The world wants you to be busy.
If you work all the time, it encourages you, it likes how passionate you are, how ambitious you are.
It tells you that success is all that matters in life, and for that you need to work as much as you can.
It doesn’t appreciate you if you sit and do nothing. It doesn’t appreciate you if you want to put in only a limited hours of work every day, so that you can focus on other areas of your life as well.
It conditions us to do more and more, achieve more and more, be as ambitious, as hard working, as busy, as such and such billionaire, celebrity, businessman, and so on.
It doesn’t want you to be you; it always wants you to be like someone else.
What a shame.
This isn’t how things were like before. And it isn’t as if there were no successful people before.
But earlier we had a place for everything in our life, and each place had its own importance and time in our everyday life.
People used to do their work, and then leave their work at their desk/factory/farm itself. They didn’t carry it to their homes. They didn’t think about it all the time. They weren’t obsessed with it.
For them, work was work. Nothing more. Nothing less.
And work existed only while doing the work. It didn’t exist when they were eating, walking, or sleeping.
Then somewhere down the line, we lost it all. Today, if a young guy puts out a chair in his garden and sits there for an hour, doing nothing, everyone else will wonder what’s wrong with him. Why doesn’t he do anything? Why is he so quiet today? Is he depressed or something?
The world, and by that I mean most of us today, don’t understand the power of doing nothing. We don’t understand the value of doing nothing. We don’t understand how important a role it plays for our inner well-being.
This practice of doing nothing every day has to come back if we don’t want to lose what little sanity we have left in the world.
We need to create several pockets of doing nothing, across our day, even if it’s just for a few minutes, so that we can get in touch with who we are, and become mindful of what we are doing at that moment, and what we are doing with our lives.
So let’s see what it means to do nothing.
To do nothing is to simply be where you are, whether sitting or standing or lying down, and just be.
Just be. That’s it. Don’t try to be something. But simply be.
Don’t try to read something. Don’t try to absorb what you see. Put away your phone and all your gadgets. Put away all those things that make you indulge in them.
And once these outer things are put away, start putting away the inner ones. Put away your thoughts and worries; put away your ambitions and goals; put away what your boss or friend or husband or wife said; put away the excitement of the upcoming vacation; put away the sorrow of the lost ones; put away all your feelings; put away all your desires.
You don’t seek anything. You don’t want anything. You don’t not want anything. You simply exist. You simply are there at that moment. You simply witness it all, but don’t participate in anything.
You don’t absorb anything. You don’t analyze what you see or hear or smell or feel. You just witness them.
You are not just doing nothing to show it to the world, to prove anything to the world. You only try to do nothing in its purest form.
It’s funny that now we have to ‘try’ to do nothing. We can’t easily do nothing as and when we want.
When you do nothing, that is the only moment when you are closer to your conscious self. It is only when you try to do truly nothing, do you realize how strong is the urge within you to do something at all times.
It is only when you do nothing, that you get this urge to check your phone, check the news, listen to something, read something, watch something. And if you can’t fulfill any of these urges, you at least want to think something, imagine something, analyze something, figure out something, worry about something.
And while you may laugh, many of us indeed would prefer to worry about something, be sad about something, rather than do nothing at all. It’s stupid of us, but it’s the truth.
This urge to do something, to at least think something, is so strong within us, that if we do nothing and think nothing it frustrates us.
I’m sure you have experienced this yourself. When you are told to wait at the Doctor’s clinic, you keep checking the time every few minutes. You keep thinking of when will your turn come, and you get impatient and perhaps even angry when someone takes too much time to come out of the Doctor’s cabin. You keep checking your phone, or that ten-year-old magazine that’s lying around. You get annoyed if some baby is crying around, and you get annoyed at the baby’s parents for not being able to shut up the baby. You argue with the receptionist if you see someone, who came after you, get in the cabin first.
All these things aren’t a reflection of what happens at Doctors’ place, it’s a reflection of who we have become. It’s a reflection of the restlessness within us, that keeps growing with each day.
It’s only that when we are at home, or at office, we aren’t aware of this restlessness, because we are always doing or thinking one thing or another.
It’s only when we are pushed into such situations that demand our patience, demand our peace of mind, demand our mindfulness, do we start to get restless, and this restlessness outbursts in one form or another.
To do nothing is to win a victory over this restlessness. The hardest and the toughest thing to do in today’s world is to do nothing.
See for yourself how good you are at doing nothing, after you finish reading this article.
See for yourself how hard it is, only to exist fully in a moment and do nothing.
When I do nothing, I simply am. I don’t think, I don’t judge, I don’t analyze, I don’t care what I see, I don’t care what I hear, I don’t care who is doing what in front of me. I simply am.
In that moment what have I got to do if the world is burning and coming to an end, or if it’s rejoicing and celebrating. I don’t care for either of them. I don’t bother about what’s happening outside, and I don’t bother about what’s happening inside me.
Whatever is happening, I let it happen. Whatever is not happening, I don’t wish it to happen. I simply am.
And I am fully content with who I am, what I am, where I am, and there is no desire to be anyone else, to be anything else, to be anywhere else.
When I do nothing, I also become nothing.
Then I am not my thoughts, I am not my feelings, I am not my desires, I am not my worries, I am not what pleases me, I am not what annoys me, I am not in the past, I am not in the future. I simply am. I simply am being nothing, being no one. I am only being. And that’s enough. That’s all I have to be. Nothing more.
Only one who does nothing is truly free in this world. Rest all are a slave to something. Only one who does nothing is the most powerful being in this world, since only he can truly become anything. The one who is already something can’t become anything. He can only remain something, and that limits what he can be. That limits his true potential.
Only the one who is nothing can become everything. Only the one who does nothing can see the world as it is, can see the universe as it is, can see himself as it is, can see whatever he sees as it is.
And only when you see things as they are, only when you see life as it is, do you see the truth about life, do you become one with the truth itself, do you become one with the universe itself, do you become one with God itself.
The best thing I can wish for you is that you do nothing every day. The most luxurious life you can live is to have the luxury of doing nothing for a while, every day.
For it is this nothingness that’s the richest of them all, most powerful of them all, most worthy of being sought after by all of us.
The universe itself starts with nothing and ends with nothing. The ultimate God himself starts from nothing and at the end becomes nothing.
You are nothing. The universe is nothing. God is nothing. And at the end, even nothing is nothing. It only is what it is.
May you do nothing today and may you become nothing today.