and wisdom, who live lives of example and service, and who call us to the same.
And still many of us keep on stumbling to the post office.
In proportion as our inward lift fails, we go constantly and desperately to the post office.
—Henry David Thoreau
Today, find a way to redirect your trip to the post office to a journey to your inward life.
Permission to Stop
The author's words are a complaint that he had to have justification for doing nothing. He and his friends could not do nothing just because they wanted to; they had to have a very good reason, such as divorce. Then they could justify taking time off, or “wasting valuable time”—they had an excuse. They had just gone through something painful, and people would be hesitant to criticize them. Their guilt would be minimal.
But then he wisely throws out that kind of thinking and gives himself permission—no justification necessary—for doing nothing.
Unnecessary self-restrictions and false guilt burden many of us and keep us from the peaceful times we yearn for. Quiet time to be alone is not an optional nicety; nor is it just for the retired, the lazy, or those naturally inclined. It is for all of us. It is valuable time well spent.
And above all, it needs no justification other than its own noble purpose: to become more fully awake and to remember what you most need to remember about yourself and your life.
The only way we could justify sitting motionless in an A-frame cabin in the north woods…was if we had just survived a really messy divorce.
—Ian Frazier
Do you need permission for doing nothing? Here it is! Use it today.
Finally Getting It
Often I find it difficult to get across the idea of doing nothing. I first discovered the resistance to the idea in myself. I continue to discover it in other people.
We are just not used to doing nothing. It sounds and feels and seems wrong somehow. We want to fill up the time with something.
At a recent mini-seminar at a bookstore, a young man, about seventeen, entered late, wearing his hat backward and carrying a skateboard. He sat down in the middle of the front row and paid close attention to what I was saying.
Midway through the presentation he raised his hand and said, “What you're saying is that we should spend a lot of time just thinking about the really important things in life, right?”
“Nooo,” I answered,”I'm suggesting that's something we should not do! Just do nothing, don't try to think about anything!” My answer was met with a vexed and quizzical look. The look remained, and as I continued the seminar his attention stayed focused on my answer to his question, and not on what I was saying.
After a little while, he stood up quite suddenly, smiled at me, gathered up his skateboard and backpack, and began to leave.
“So long,” I said, interrupting my presentation. All eyes were on him as he took the opportunity to say, “So long! Oh, and thanks for Nothing. I appreciate it!”
I think he meant it.
Thanks for Nothing!
—A young seminar participant
Today, consider the question: What is my understanding of doing nothing?
Reality Check
Occasionally someone will say to me,”Just sitting and doing nothing seems to be running from the real world, hiding from what you don't want to face.” My response is to reiterate that intentionally doing nothing is indeed the opposite of running and hiding. This is because it brings you face-to-face with—even to the point of embracing—the most important and challenging aspects of human life, those based on your meanings and values.
As Eliot says, if you want roses, plant trees. What doing nothing can do is help you know what you really want—is it roses, or gladiolas, or redwoods, or none of those?—so that you don't end up with a beautiful garden of what you don't want.
The English novelist quoted above, George Eliot, speaks these words from personal experience. Born Mary Anne Evans into the male-dominated Victorian world, she led her rich and complex life successfully competing in the theological and literary worlds of her time. Her masculine pen name increased the power she needed in order to be all she wanted to be, not running and hiding, just embracing life as she saw it, and in the era in which she saw it.
No waiting for a rain of roses for her.
It will never rain roses: When we want to have more roses we must plant more trees.
—George Eliot
Today consider if you are waiting for a rain of roses.
New Eyes
A significant challenge to any seminar presenter is the problem of follow-up or continuity: What is going to allow the participants to keep their new insights fresh and accessible? What would keep the information from fading into the fog of forgetting, which the passage of time seems to engender? It's typical for participants to leave the seminar with the best of intentions and enthusiasm, and just as typical for participants to lose them in a few weeks.
One response to this challenge is to base the seminar on the skill of having new eyes. If you leave with new eyes, the follow-up problem takes care of itself; everything you see from now on will be a new discovery.
You will have a new and different way of seeing something that you have been looking at all your life.
Something such as “doing nothing”: Today I am going to use new eyes with which to see “doing nothing.”
For today, please see time spent doing nothing not with your old eyes, not as a waste of time, not as boring, not as unproductive, not as guilt-ridden laziness. Now, please see it with new eyes, as very fertile time, as urgently necessary and life-giving time, in which to wake up and remember who you are.
See it as the most important time of your life.
The problem of follow-up disappears when you have new eyes.
The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.
—Marcel Proust
Today bring new eyes, rather than new landscapes, to what you want to discover.
Road Rage
I wonder if you have the same experience that I sometimes do. I'm driving along, thinking that I am in a fine mood, when the driver waiting at a stoplight in front of me puts on his left turn signal just as the light turns green. The reaction is immediate and strong: I am absolutely furious! I struggle not to lay on the horn and do a few other things as well.
How can I go from serenity to rage in an instant? And because
