Comedian Chris Ryan Pens An Open Letter To Busy People

“How are you going, busy? Yeah, me too. I’m trying to find a bit of calm, though. Once a day, I’ll plant my face in the weird mat on my lounge room floor and try not to think.

[I need to vacuum]

It’s harder than it sounds.

[Where did this hair come from it’s not even mine]

I bought the weird mat from the internet and it’s become the spiritual leader of the household. It’s made of memory foam so it’s like. . . Sentient.

[Weird mat: Chris, relax]

It’s solving problems I didn’t know I had. Like, I’m pretty highly strung but if I lie face down on the weird mat for long enough, I don’t care about anything anymore. It’s made the floor popular again – it’s more comfortable than my couch. Friends come over and we all take off our shoes and lie on it like we’re in a cult. They walk in, take one look at weird mat and go 'this is a shoes off house now'. And they’re right, I kind of respect it more than any other object in the house.

So I lie there, nose squished into the dense blue fabric and breathe for a few seconds and try to let go of the things I’m meant to be doing and why I can’t bring myself to do them. Sometimes, the only way I get anything done is if I really don’t want to do something else. I love procrastinating because you can get so much done. None of it is what you’re supposed to be doing. When I need to do 15 minutes of work, I’ll do an hour of other stuff not on the to-do list. I will crack open a very expensive clear wipe lens cleaner and clean my laptop screen and spectacles for 10 minutes. I will wash the compost bucket. I have literally walked around and picked up large crumbs by hand because I don’t want to do my tax.



I wonder sometimes if people procrastinate their lives away. They’re like: “I really wanted to be an opera singer but I’m just going to go on ahead and run the kids to school for 25 years.”

You’ve got to find your own way to relax. Once, staying at a friend’s place, she played an ocean soundtrack on loop all night to send herself to sleep. It started with gentle waves, lapping on the shore but it would escalate to a full blown tornado before returning to the gentle lapping. I found myself lying awake, anticipating the destruction, in disbelief that anyone could fall asleep to it.

There’s a bird that squawks all day in a tree outside my place. All. Day. It doesn’t annoy me, I like it. But I wonder what that bird is trying to achieve? Does it know that it sounds, quite frankly, dumb? Does anyone? Its chirping is consistent, reassuring. It lulls me to sleep, which is the only reason I meditate on the weird mat.”