Doing Nothing

It’s probably impossible to do nothing; if not, though, I’m especially bad at it.

I can never just be—I’ve always go to be doing something, and it’s usually the next thing.

For instance, here I am at our campsite, drinking coffee, where you’d think it would be enough to simply enjoy the outdoors and savor the first cup of the day, but no. I’m concurrently tending the fire, trying to write, thinking about changing my clothes, organizing breakfast, jumping up to move a piece of gear here or there, looking for the book I’m reading, reading a passage, swatting mosquitoes, and planning our trip back home.

It’s beyond me to do nothing more than appreciate the experience—or maybe this is just how I do it. If so, though, it’s still curious to me why that in itself isn’t enough and why I insist upon gilding its proverbial lily.

I’m inclined to say that this is the human condition—never satisfied, always grasping at the next thing, but it’s not obvious to me that all humans are like this: witness those clerks at Radio Shack who just sit there, so I fear that it’s just me—or some general, but not particularly large subclass of people like me, (not really Type A, more like a B-plus.)

I’m not sure, anyway, that doing nothing is something that should be aspired to; and even if it is, I’m pretty sure that it’s an unresolvable paradox to do so.

But certainly there’s something to be a said for being less frenetic and experiencing life more fully.

People from all sorts of traditions I admire, from Buddhists to functional alcoholics point out the value of taking things more slowly; Richard Leider regularly refers to the “hurry sickness” of the contemporary world.

I’m all for curing that; I’d like to be able to be less scattered; less hurried, less rushed.

But how do we do that? How does one do less?