In Troubled Times: DO NOTHING
I don’t generally talk politics here but I also cannot ignore that I and a large majority of my readers/students/fans are pretty stressed out over the result of the election. This stress increases with every new appointment. Students have been asking me what they can do to manage.
I used to tell people that the best thing they can do is meditate, but lately I think meditation has moved to #2 on my list. What’s #1?
Nothing.
Doing nothing.
Lazing. Lolligagging. Lounging. Languishing. Reposing. Flopping. Doing absolutely nothing.
You can sit. You can walk. You can do a repetitive task like throw a ball against a wall or mow the lawn, but nothing that takes any kind of real focused attention.
Not reading, and definitely not meditating.
You should consciously and deliberately do nothing for periods of time every day.
Why? Because you need it. Because that time has been taken from you and your brain doesn’t work without it. It’s the time when you make meaningful connections between all those ideas that you ingest. Without these connections, the information you take in becomes meaningless. It’s about context.
100 years ago people didn’t need to think about deliberately getting physical exercise. The need to walk from place to place, and the physical activities of daily chores took care of that for us. Once we innovated away the need for a lot of physical movement we had to start deliberately getting it in – or suffer the consequences of not exercising.
Idle time is the same.
When was the last time you were bored with nothing to do? Can you even remember? Life used to be filled with long gaps where we took in no new information and didn’t produce anything. We just had to be.
Media developments in the latter half of the 20th century chipped away at our idle time slowly, but in 2007 when the IPhone was invented, that was pretty much the nail in the coffin. No one needed to take a minute and just be. If people have so much as a minute to wait in line for coffee, the phone comes out. I do it to.
And you know what? There is nothing inherently wrong with that! I like smartphones just like as much as I like having a car.
But just like having a car means I have find time to walk, having a smartphone and other media means I have to find time to be idle.
So really. I tell you truthfully. If you are feeling stressed and overwhelmed by the election, or the state of the world, or anything else: Schedule time to just look out a window. To listen to an album you have heard 100 times. To watch clouds run across the moon. Just EXIST.
When you do this, your focused meditation, your prayers, your rituals, your books, your news…. they will all have room to breathe and speak to you in ways that you have forgotten.