The Lost Art of Doing Nothing
This article appeared in the first issue of Antigone, Daydreamer. You can read it here.
Most students will agree that there’s usually a period of readjusting to normal life after a particularly intense semester. You can’t just slam on breaks and immediately start living your best couch potato life. But usually it isn’t too long before you stop thinking in terms of deadlines and timetables and start enjoying the freedom of not having rigidly schedules days that consist of eat, study, sleep, repeat.
The day after I wrote my undergraduate exam, out of sheer habit I woke up at my usual hour and found myself sitting at my desk ready to study before the coffee had even been brewed. Of course, I had nothing to study. I was done. My degree was in the bag (although I wouldn’t know for sure until I got my results a few months later). Yet I couldn’t bring myself to relax and enjoy this achievement.
Instead of slowing down over time like I expected to, in the weeks that followed I found myself trying to maintain the same busy schedule I had managed not only for the past three months in preparation for exams, but also for the past three years of my undergraduate studies. On auto-pilot, I was a busy person, and I found this a little unsettinglng — not only because I had never been a chronically busy sort of person, but also because I was incapable of doing simple things I used to love doing. I couldn’t simply draw or read or take a walk on the beach without thinking that I ought to be doing something more productive.
Realising how much my mindset had shifted over the past three years, I decided to take a closer look at what was driving me to stay busy all the time and why I couldn’t slow down after months of hard word. In this process I re-discovered a skill that I didn’t know was a skill: doing nothing.
“Niksen: as the Dutch call it. In this article I want to share some tips with you and hopefully convince you to come over to the dark side where we daydreaming and “do nothing”.
Before we get to the how-to, you might be wondering if there is any merit in this project of learning how to do nothing. There are three main reasons I think you should make idleness (boredom, even) a part of your life:
- Constant busyness without any breaks inevitably leads to burnout.
- Busyness also robs us of our ability to pay real, meaningful attention to our lives.
- Boredom is a catalyst for creativity.
Burnout
Intentionally setting aside time to do nothing can help you avoid burnout. Not only do you get a break from your to do list, you get into a mindset that allows you to question some of the things on that to do list.
Stop and ask yourself: why do you want to do all of these things? Which are the things you absolutely must do? And which are the things that are most important to you?
Busyness
Philosopher Bertrand Russell published an essay titled ‘In Praise of Idleness’ in 1935 where he writes:
“There was formerly a capacity for lightheartedness and play which has been inhibited by the cult of efficiency. The modern man thinks that everything ought to be done for the sake of something else, and never for its own sake.”
The cult of efficiency? That sounds eerily familiar. One possible reason for our discomfort with the notion of “doing nothing” is that we feel guilty to be doing nothing. Everyone and everything around us (and often everything within us) is telling us we ought to be doing something productive, something important.
The very first thing most people said when I told them I had just finished my degree was always “Oh cool, so what’s next?”. The ink on my Shakespeare essay is barely dry and everyone wants to know what I would be doing next. Of course, they mean well, but I couldn’t help noticing they were never happy with my answer: I’m going to take a break.
If you are not busy with something, anything really, it seems you are deemed not interesting or valuable or important. What worried me was that I seemed to be buying into this idea too. For all my rebelling against these cultural notions of worth, here I was quite unable to sit still, unhappy with not having anything “important” to do, and barely able to enjoy my achievements because I was already thinking about what I should do next.
The negative connotations we associate with idleness are another reason we might prefer to constantly be busy (and to be perceived as such by others). Virginia Woolf observes something in A Room of One’s Own that has since been explored further in a number or scientific studies:
“… it is in our idleness, in our dreams, that the submerged truth sometimes comes to the top.”
Boredom
Another benefit of idleness can be found in this 2012 study which suggested that letting your mind wander actually fosters creativity.
After not too long, the sheer dullness of being bored and having nothing to do will propel you towards creating something to do. In his book On Kissing, Tickling and Being Bored, Adam Phillips suggests that boredom is a period in which you are “both waiting for something and looking for something, in which hope is secretly being negotiated.” (my emphasis)
Philips writes about one boy:
“I asked him what would happen if he allowed himself to be bored, and he paused for the first time, I think, in the treatment, and said “I wouldn’t know what I was looking forward to,” and was, momentarily, quite panic-stricken by this thought.”
When you are used to always having something to occupy your mind or fill your time available at your fingertips, it can indeed be a little panic-inducing to think of being bored.
In the next section I want to share three ways I’ve found to practice the ‘lightheartedness and play’ Russell talks about, and thus relearn how to direct your attention with intentionality rather than having it “tossed about” on your behalf, ping-ponging through the Internet and through life.
Unplug
It’s a piece of advice that you are likely tired of hearing by now, but it stubbornly proves to be true: you’ve got to disconnect from everything now and then — whether for a few minutes a day or one day a week.
Doing nothing can feel especially daunting because we never get the chance to be good old-fashioned stare-at-the-ceiling bored anymore. Being constantly connected to the Internet means we only ever get as far as being stare-at-our-screens bored, which seldom really feels like boredom when there’s always something to see, something to like, or something to buy.
Linger
Do the things you have to do with a bit more patience and presence of mind than you normally would. Roman philosopher and playwright Seneca wrote, “nothing is less characteristic of a man preoccupied than living.” It is impossible to live any moment of your life if you are constantly preoccupied with the future or the past.
This alone can take a lifetime to master, but that in itself is immensely helpful to know: patience is a skill to be practieced, not an innate ability that you either have or do not have. Mindfulness is a muscle to be exercised. Stop to notice your life while you are living it.
Listen
The very first exercise in The Creative Writing Coursebook is about listening. The instructions are to observe five sounds and write them down. Describe them and then describe what you associate with each, what each makes you think of.
Julia Bell writes:
“… look at the words you have chosen to describe the things you have heard and the associations you have made with those sounds. These are you stories, this is your language, this is the beginning of your fictional voice.”
Even if you have no interest in being a writer, simply noticing the sounds around you can help you being to see your “story”, your life. What has been going on in your life and your inner world that you have been missing due to being busy?
I’ll leave you with this quote from Gordon Hempton’s beautiful book One Square Inch of Silence:
“Silence is not the absence of something but the presence of everything . . . It is the presence of time, undisturbed. It can be felt within the chest. Silence nurtures our nature, our human nature, and lets us know who we are. Left with a more receptive mind and a more attuned ear, we become better listeners not only to nature but to each other. Silence can be carried like embers from a fire. Silence can be found, and silence can find you. Silence can be lost and also recovered. But silence cannot be imagined, although most people think so. To experience the soul-swelling wonder of silence, you must hear it.”
