Often I find it difficult to get across the idea of doing nothing. I first discovered the resistance to the idea in myself. I continue to discover it in other people.
We are just not used to doing nothing. It sounds and feels and seems wrong somehow. We want to fill up the time with something.
At a recent mini-seminar at a bookstore, a young man, about seventeen, entered late, wearing his hat backward and carrying a skateboard. He sat down in the middle of the front row and paid close attention to what I was saying.
Midway through the presentation he raised his hand and said, “What you're saying is that we should spend a lot of time just thinking about the really important things in life, right?”
“Nooo,” I answered,”I'm suggesting that's something we should not do! Just do nothing, don't try to think about anything!” My answer was met with a vexed and quizzical look. The look remained, and as I continued the seminar his attention stayed focused on my answer to his question, and not on what I was saying.
After a little while, he stood up quite suddenly, smiled at me, gathered up his skateboard and backpack, and began to leave.
“So long,” I said, interrupting my presentation. All eyes were on him as he took the opportunity to say, “So long! Oh, and thanks for Nothing. I appreciate it!”
I think he meant it.
Thanks for Nothing!
—A young seminar participant
Today, consider the question: What is my understanding of doing nothing?
Reality Check
Occasionally someone will say to me,”Just sitting and doing nothing seems to be running from the real world, hiding from what you don't want to face.” My response is to reiterate that intentionally doing nothing is indeed the opposite of running and hiding. This is because it brings you face-to-face with—even to the point of embracing—the most important and challenging aspects of human life, those based on your meanings and values.
As Eliot says, if you want roses, plant trees. What doing nothing can do is help you know what you really want—is it roses, or gladiolas, or redwoods, or none of those?—so that you don't end up with a beautiful garden of what you don't want.
The English novelist quoted above, George Eliot, speaks these words from personal experience. Born Mary Anne Evans into the male-dominated Victorian world, she led her rich and complex life successfully competing in the theological and literary worlds of her time. Her masculine pen name increased the power she needed in order to be all she wanted to be, not running and hiding, just embracing life as she saw it, and in the era in which she saw it.
No waiting for a rain of roses for her.
It will never rain roses: When we want to have more roses we must plant more trees.
—George Eliot
Today consider if you are waiting for a rain of roses.
New Eyes
A significant challenge to any seminar presenter is the problem of follow-up or continuity: What is going to allow the participants to keep their new insights fresh and accessible? What would keep the information from fading into the fog of forgetting, which the passage of time seems to engender? It's typical for participants to leave the seminar with the best of intentions and enthusiasm, and just as typical for participants to lose them in a few weeks.
One response to this challenge is to base the seminar on the skill of having new eyes. If you leave with new eyes, the follow-up problem takes care of itself; everything you see from now on will be a new discovery.
You will have a new and different way of seeing something that you have been looking at all your life.
Something such as “doing nothing”: Today I am going to use new eyes with which to see “doing nothing.”
For today, please see time spent doing nothing not with your old eyes, not as a waste of time, not as boring, not as unproductive, not as guilt-ridden laziness. Now, please see it with new eyes, as very fertile time, as urgently necessary and life-giving time, in which to wake up and remember who you are.
See it as the most important time of your life.
The problem of follow-up disappears when you have new eyes.
The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.
—Marcel Proust
Today bring new eyes, rather than new landscapes, to what you want to discover.
Road Rage
I wonder if you have the same experience that I sometimes do. I'm driving along, thinking that I am in a fine mood, when the driver waiting at a stoplight in front of me puts on his left turn signal just as the light turns green. The reaction is immediate and strong: I am absolutely furious! I struggle not to lay on the horn and do a few other things as well.
How can I go from serenity to rage in an instant? And because of such a thing as a left turn? Can't I really afford the thirty seconds or minute that I'll have to wait? What happened? What's going on in me?
The only answer I can come up with is that the car has become a symbol of so many of the societal frustrations we experience today. The classic symbol of our independence now often thwarts our progress and becomes an inconvenience and a limit on our freedom, not a means to it.
For a serene life, we need to pay a lot of attention to driving automobiles, whether or not we actually drive.
I propose spending some time getting to know your car—well, not your car, really, but getting to know yourself in your car. Think about how you want to react to other drivers, talk to family members and friends about your common experiences while driving, and perhaps change your expectations of what driving will actually be like for you—more traffic, more delays, more jams.
And if the rage hits you anyway, remember to take a deep breath or two—always do that. Then see what you can come up with to restore serenity. I try to think of the fact that I'm only one of many trying to get somewhere. And if I'm feeling particularly honest, I recall that sometimes I am the one putting on the left turn signal just as the light turns green.
There is no class of person more moved by hate than the motorist.
—C. R. Hewitt
Spend some time with your car today.
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Making Room for Life
Something from Nothing
When our creative thinking has come to a halt and our thoughts are caught in fruitless repetitive circles, it is time to stop and allow our minds to meander.
This was certainly true for Elias Howe, who lived in the mid-1800s and is credited with inventing the sewing machine. The story goes that one day, as he was working on the sewing machine project, he became particularly frustrated. He had been working with a regular sewing needle and had tried many different ways to mechanize it, with no success.
He decided to take a break from his efforts and sat at the window of his workshop, gazing out in reverie. He later told his wife what happened:
As I wandered in my mind, a remarkable scene came to me. I was in a deep jungle and I was in a big, black pot with a roaring fire under it. I was being cooked alive! A warrior came at me with spear raised and ready to thrust.
But what I noticed at that moment was something very curious about the spear: It had a hole in its tip.
The pivotal discovery in the invention of the sewing machine is that the hole for the thread goes in the tip of the needle,