In Defense of Doing Nothing

Lately I’ve taken up a new hobby that’s fast becoming one of the first and most important things I do every morning. It usually goes like this:

I wake up, wipe the sleep out of my eyes, pound a cup of coffee (or if I’m being honest, 2 or 3), set a timer for 20 minutes…

…Then I sit down on a pillow in the middle of my living room, and I do nothing. I sit there, I stare directly in front of me, and the only thing I think about is my breathing; my lungs expanding and contracting as the air goes in and out. When the 20 minutes is up, I’m done. And that’s it.

That’s all.

The irony of this pointless task is that it’s much harder than it sounds. That’s because we, as animals, have evolved to always be either doing or thinking. We’re constantly acting out our desires, making plans in our minds… The list goes on and on. This constant rationalizing and reasoning makes us the greatest multitaskers in the animal kingdom, able to work on an important presentation while thinking about what to eat for breakfast tomorrow. Name me another mammal that can pull that off.

But it’s also that very same type of thinking that causes us to be anxious, or dissatisfied, or depressed. Because when those thoughts get strong enough, they have a tendency to push or pull us in certain directions—often unintentionally. Don’t believe me? Just think back to a time when you had a disagreement with a loved one and it ruined your day, or you were assigned a difficult task at work and got frustrated about it before you even started.

Our brains can expend enormous amounts of energy on imagined futures or memories of the past. What sitting down and doing nothing does is help me to see those things for what they are: just thoughts. By taking a moment to turn the overthinking part of my brain off for just a fraction of my day, I’m afforded a brief glimpse at an infinitely important realization: the future doesn’t exist, and neither does the past. The only thing that’s really, truly real, is the here and now.

So why not take some time to enjoy it? Feel the morning air on your skin, hear the chirping birds outside your window, and appreciate the present moment for what it is. We’re human beings after all, not human doings or human thinkings.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got a wall to go stare at.