Turns out there is quite a bit of doing when doing nothing, at least in my head. My experience with doing nothing is that there’s a lot going on below the surface while I’m sitting there waiting for whatever sign it is that I think I need from the universe to move me in whatever direction is supposed to come next.
Yesterday was a hard day. Not sure why, just woke up with this idea that things should be different: my life, my job, my living situation, my home. Everything in life seemed ill fitting yesterday and that made me want to run away, far and without cell service.
I had a busy day and had a lot going on, so I did not run away, I attended to what needed to be attended to...but in my head, I was a million miles away.
I had a million ideas coming at me hard and fast yesterday and I wanted to act on most of them. Luckily I spent the time in mediation and prayer, inhabiting my body, and I didn’t do anything. I just did nothing, other than what I was supposed to do.
Today I am grateful for the pause. I am grateful for all the nothing I did instead of all the something I wanted to do. I went to the gym for two hours and set about expending some of that energy I seem to have an overabundance of...and was able to go to bed without blowing up my life or anyone else’s.
But I have to tell you there were moments that were excruciating. Absolutely agonizingly awful with all the nothing I was doing when everything in me was screaming, “DO SOMETHING, ANYTHING RIGHT FUCKING NOW!”
So I did, I chose to do nothing which as I have stated is actually harder than doing something. Nothing requires mad skills that are fundamentally underdeveloped in my life. And this is mostly because I am always doing something instead of doing nothing, because doing something is way easier than doing nothing. Maybe this makes no sense, except possibly to those of you who similarly suffer with an innate inability to do nothing...
Turns out yesterday was a pretty good day despite what my mind thought, and I enjoyed the absolute lack of fruits of any labor so much that I plan to do nothing again today.
And I can assure you that my doing nothing will look a lot like a great deal of doing something to every observer, but to me, I am not doing all the things that I desperately want to do...and that is why doing nothing is quite exhausting.
