The Power of Doing Nothing

I am experimenting with something rather radical for me.

DOING NOTHING!

I do not mean doing nothing while secretly making a grocery list in my head. I do not mean sitting down with a cup of tea while answering emails. I do not mean taking a walk while planning three blogs, two presentations, a zoom meeting, and what I will accomplish when I get home. NOPE! I mean actually doing nothing. I have concluded I have no idea how to accomplish this. BUT, I envy humans who do.

In Blog 103, I confessed that somewhere during the past 18 years I lost the weekend. I did not lose it all at once. I gave it away in small responsible looking pieces. A little work on a Friday night. Completing a few unfinished tasks on Saturday. Preparation for Monday on Sunday. Before I realized it every day became a workday wearing different clothes. Once I realized this, I made the bold decision to reclaim my weekend.

Excellent.

But then I discovered a problem. What was I supposed to do with it? Or more alarming, what if I did not do anything with it? I spent years believing that a good day is a productive day. Ya know, if I completed the list, answered the messages, worked on the website, wrote something meaningful, helped someone, learned something, or created something, the day counted.

But sitting? Staring? Wandering with no destination? Surely there must be a form to fill out before I am allowed to do that. Doing nothing seems easy until you try it.

The body may be sitting still, but the mind immediately calls an emergency meeting. Shouldn’t we be doing something? Did we forget something? Couldn’t we use this time more wisely? And there it is. The belief that time is only valuable when we can produce evidence of how we used it.

Perhaps doing nothing is not a waste of time. Maybe it is where our nervous system settles and our bodies finally exhale. It could be where our thoughts start marching in formation and begin wandering wherever they want to go. Or how about this, perhaps it is where creativity resurfaces. Not because we demanded it, scheduled it, or squeezed it onto a list, but because we finally gave it room.

When we stop filling every available space, we may begin to hear the things that the ‘busyness’ has been drowning out. A feeling that we have ignored. A question that we have avoided. A dream we placed on hold. A quiet little nudge that has been patiently waiting for us to stop talking.

Doing nothing may look empty from the outside. But something important may be happening inside.

I am beginning to understand that doing nothing is not the opposite of living. It may actually be one of the ways we experience being fully alive. We notice the light moving across the room. We hear the birds we were too busy to hear. We sit with our pup without checking the time. We allow a moment to be enough without turning it into a lesson, a project, or dare I say it, a blog. Well perhaps eventually it becomes a blog. I am still a beginner. 😂

This does not mean I plan to stop doing the things that matter to me. But a life filled only with meaningful activity is a life filled to the brim.

Even the things we love need space around them. Music needs pauses. Words need margins. Humans need moments in which nothing is required of them.

So maybe rest is not something we do after life. Maybe rest is a part of life. And so I am practicing. I am stopping before everything is finished. I am leaving a little “white” space each day, I am trying to not leap up everytime work calls.

But here is “the thing”, the discomfort is real. So is the guilt. But I am beginning to suspect that the guilt is simply an old habit objecting to the new arrangement. The coming weekend I may accomplish absolutely nothing. I plan to be very successful at it. Perhaps doing nothing is not the absence of living. Perhaps it is actually where life catches up with us.

I think it is time for life to catch me.

💚 The Accidental Blogger