I’ve been trying to design my life to give more time to leisure, but I’ve realised that even as I free up more time I still find myself always doing something.
I have found myself wanting a life of leisure that, it seems, I choose to try and fill with things. I’ve indentified that I want to spend more time reading, playing guitar, learning piano, writing and more.
While I enjoy all these things they are all things that require a not-insignificant amount of mental capacity and…time.
When a busy workday is done, it soon follows that I haven’t got the energy for these things. When the weekend arrives, I find myself trying to fill it with reading, catching up on articles, as well as the never-ending drip of DIY and life maintenance.
Ultimately though, I think (and as with most realisations this was always there in front of me) I just need to do nothing.
Space is what I crave.
I need to try myself to have no input. No podcasts, TV, books, music, articles, tasks, to-do lists to sort. I just need to do, well, nothing. And I mean really nothing.
Boardness, stillness, nothingness. Just. Do. Nothing.
Take the Nike Mantra. Just Do Nothing and I might have cracked it.
Even self-improvement takes up too much time. We feel like we should be meditating, journaling, thinking through Koans, working on my virtues. Should I be cleaning mindfully? Stretch more? Yes, everyone should stretch more. Learn to cook five different dishes. Yes, yes, but these are all doing something and what we should strive for now is doing…nothing.
Just sit. Not in a meditation way but in a nothing way. Don’t worry about trying to clear your mind (good luck with that anyway), just seek contentedness and tranquillity, without seeking it just by doing nothing.
There is no task, good or bad. There is no input. There is no output. There is nothing. Don’t think beyond that and you might be where you need to be.