The sweet art of doing nothing
Sunday, May 17, 2015 at 05:51AM The only thing I envy smokers is the excuse they have to disappear for a while and do nothing. I look longingly at them – standing at street corners, loitering in city doorways, taking the occasional drag and staring into space.
These days, of course, they are more likely to be gazing into a smart phone than space, so the effect isn’t quite the same. In fact, the main reason I don’t want a smart phone is that it will inevitably, no matter how disciplined I fancy I am being, take some of the time I currently have for doing absolutely nothing. On the train, idly looking out the windows. Ditto on the tram. Best of all, on a verandah, or in bed, where you don’t even have the excuse of getting somewhere which is purposeful and productive. You are simply practicing the sweet art of doing nothing.
There’s an old saying, ‘Sometimes I sits and thinks and sometimes I just sits’. That’s me, if you substitute the work ‘pray’ for ‘think’. And I suspect that just sitting is as efficacious, in some mysterious way, as prayer or meditation.
It’s not simply that I am more likely to get ideas when I am ostensibly doing nothing at all, although that does happen. Walking with no head- or ear-phones is another great way of emptying the mind, but you are still doing something useful. The wonderful, subversive, counter-cultural thing about sitting or lying and doing nothing is that you are not being remotely useful in the sense that our society thinks of usefulness, with its outcome assessments and its KPIs, its insistence that even the closest relationships with our loved ones can be quantified somehow when it is ‘quality time’. Whatever the hell that is.
A lovely woman I know whose husband has Alzheimer’s said to me that she has lots of people to do things with, but she misses have someone to do nothing with. Another wise older woman, my step-mum, says that after she has had a long plane trip, she needs time ‘for my soul to catch up with my body’.
At the moment, with all that is happening in our family I seem to need extra time for my soul, or maybe it’s my heart, to catch up with my brain. I love being at work, for the distraction and the sheer normality it provides, but by day’s end I am so exhausted I can barely compose a sentence. It was like this when I was pregnant. I was always deeply weary, and had to remind myself there was a good reason for this: although I barely sensed it, there was so much going on inside me. I tell myself this now as well – at one level I feel oddly normal, but inside, in a place I can only sometimes access, my body, mind, heart and spirit are acclimatising themselves to a reality that is radically new.
And one of the things that helps me with this is sitting or lying and doing nothing. I sit on the verandah at home and stare out through the last of the scarlet leaves on our west facing creepers, maybe sip some tea, wrap my hands around the comforting warmth of the mug I am holding and do absolutely nothing else. Lying in bed of an afternoon is another good time to practise this. I am an afternoon napper; these days I find it hard to drop off, but still I lie there for a hour or more; I simply stare at the ceiling rose and let my mind go blank.
At our shack at Anglesea, the bedroom is the best place to do this that I know. Every window looks out to tossing twisted old eucalypts and stubbly ti-trees, sky and racing clouds. Everything is timeless and there are no buildings in sight. I can lie there for hours, just watching the leaves hang and blow.
Years of doing this have taught me that something does go on, at some deep inner level, when I am engaged in this ultimate non-activity. It reminds me that I am dispensable, and the world will keep turning quite happily without me. It balances the busyness that I willingly fill up so much of my time with. It also reassures me about any illness or decrepitude that lies in my own future. I often think that as long as I can read and walk, then I will always manage somehow. But if I am blind and incapacitated, even if my mind fails, as long as I can access this blank, deep, precious inner space and retreat there, I will be okay.
Reader Comments (3)
Thanks Clare- lovely reminder of the art form of being still. I felt rested just by reading your description of your times of reverie and/or letting the mind just drift, like the clouds.
More Clare wisdom for us to savour - thank you. I affirm your commitment to quietness and 'being' over 'doing' but I have to confess these days, I honour it more in the breach than the observance. Perhaps that accounts for my present disconnection with the world. A minor Scottish poet wrote a couplet which has haunted me down the years and is counterpoint to your own practice. "To do and do was all their fun/ When comes an end to doing, they are done."
Beautiful words to express the importance of resting in the spaciousness of the uncluttered mind. Thank you dear Clare.