The hardest thing to do is nothing.
It sounds unlikely at first, but if you’ve ever given yourself a real meditation challenge of trying to release each thought as it comes, you know what I’m talking about. Add the way my mind usually works, and yeah, doing nothing is a lot harder than doing too much.
For the past several months, I’ve tried to make -doing nothing- my quest. I had a fun and exciting year for most of 2024 but towards the end I was beyond ready for some rest. I found a nearly six month block with no trips or big ticket items and set a goal to keep it that way.
Almost immediately, everyone at home got sick, so the first couple months of the do nothing experiment weren’t exactly restful. But I wondered about the conspicuous timing right when I decided to make more space.
Eventually things got more restful. “Nothing” began to include more field trips with the kids, making kombucha, freestyle rap improv, date nights, and arcades. (My version of nothing may look really different from others’!)
It’s a chaotic time in the world, and deliberately doing nothing seems almost frivolous. But just like you gotta get a good water-type or two before taking on a Charizard, it’s important to meet the chaos with an opposite energy. Stillness. I think Thomas Merton and Thich Nhat Hanh said it better, but they didn’t have Pokémon analogies!
Anyways, with Spring emerging and having just returned from my first trip in a while (a small, sweet one), I suspect that this season is giving way to a new one. But it gave us a lot of good.