You always feel you should be doing something else

Let us sit with this quietly, and listen to the voice itself. The voice does not want you anywhere; it wants you elsewhere — it never lands, for if you switched to the other thing it would only point past it to the next; it is not a guide to the right activity but a restlessness whose nature is to want you elsewhere, a place you can never arrive because arriving turns it into here, so you cannot obey your way to peace with it. Being half-here is a way of being nowhere — pulled always toward the next thing, the task gets half of you and the elsewhere gets none, and the sum is a life at a slight remove from itself, present for nothing; the voice promises productivity and delivers absence, spoiling even your rest with guilt. And arrive fully in the one thing, and let the rest wait — not doing more but being here, giving the thing in front of you your whole self and, when the voice points elsewhere, noticing it and returning gently as you would a wandering child; the rest will wait, and a life is only lived in the present one you keep leaving. What were you doing, recently, when the voice pulled you away from it?