Doing Nothing

The biggest challenge after I left my corporate career a couple of years back has been to do nothing when there is nothing to do. These challenges have cropped up often, of late.

Not that when I was in a job, I had a lot to do all the time. A lot of days even then I had nothing to do. I didn’t tell anyone though. Everyone seemed busy on their laptops. I didn’t stay with nothing to do for long. Back then, it was almost a matter of urgency to get up and do something. It was also easier to get out of doing nothing when in the job. All it took was a meeting or two.

But now, things are different. There is no one watching. I don’t need to appear busy. There is no compulsion for me to do something when there is nothing to do. There are no meetings to do with anyone. No one calls me nor do I call anyone for any meeting. Doing nothing is not an abnormal situation anymore. I have started getting comfortable with it.

It may sound like another way of saying I like leisure but writing allows such luxuries. For a while you write something, almost on a routine, and then, for a while, you do nothing.

The challenge is to really do nothing when you have nothing to do. In that way, when you have something to do, you do it well.

I think this may be true of a lot of fields outside business, related to art and perhaps even sport. Activity all the time is not necessarily better there. The trick is to learn how to handle inactivity.

All of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone. When Blaise Pascal said that, he may have meant that doing nothing is often a fairly good skill.

I hope you get the picture. I don’t mean the kind of doing nothing that busy people do when they decide to go on an expensive retreat to cut off from the world. I mean the kind of doing nothing that, well, is really doing nothing because you have nothing to do. I realised it is simple but not easy.

I specifically mention it because I met a friend from the busy category a few days back.

He was a busy executive with lots of work, lots of meetings and lots of responsibilities. As it turned out, he was a close friend too. I met him and he asked me what I do all day.

I said – well, most of my mornings and some of the afternoons, I write. And rest of the time, I do nothing. Maybe I read, if I feel like it.

He was surprised. But to my surprise, he felt like he had to do something about doing nothing. He said he needed more time doing nothing, as he was always busy. I said, well, I don’t have that problem. I don’t have to search for time to do nothing, it just is there.

I don’t know what activity started in his head after that. What he did after that surprised me even more, and that’s why I wrote this article, when I had nothing else to do.

He opened his calendar on the phone and set up a meeting inviting his staff for it, every Friday afternoon from three pm to five pm. The title of the meeting was ‘doing nothing.’

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