Do Nothing
It’s Tuesday, 30th May. (Or at least the day I took this picture and started writing). It is Day 2 of my summer vacation. We visited the massive Palais Des Papes(Pope’s palace) and Pont Avignon yesterday and today we went to the Pont Du Gard.
When we planned this vacation, I looked at several itineraries of what to do in south of France, I came with high hopes of seeing the lavender fields in full blossom and to see every part of this wonderful region. The mild spring we’ve had, plus the fact that lavender blooms more in July than early June, left us stranded with mostly green fields without the lavender but, we did get to see some incredible poppy fields.
If you’re a regular reader and hadn’t noticed in my writing, I am a very goal-oriented person. I like to set targets for everything in my life. Even the solar intensity that my watch gets on a day-to-day basis. I plan all my meals, schedule every single minute of my life and try to be a productivity machine.
Much like the picture above, the kayak of my life is fighting against the flow of time. I feel life is too short to be frittered away on meaningless tasks(and yet I wake up and go to work everyday). I’m not yet willing to admit that I have a problem with organization and control. Ok, I am bit of control freak, but not to problematic levels plus I have a balancer for me in life. Someone who tells me I am being annoying when I wait for the oil to be at the right temperature before putting in the onions. Every morning, I have 5 tasks which are set as recurrent reminders on my phone to be done in the morning and a few more in the evening.
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So, as I sat down in a lawn chair looking at flowers blooming in the garden, I decided to stop churning the wheels of motion in my head. I told myself: Let’s do nothing. Even the act of doing nothing is something: you make things come to a halt. But when they finally come to halt and you let go, the feeling of doing nothing can be exhilarating.
In my head, I pushed away thoughts of what to visit next and what to cook. I pushed away the plans for the week after this or who would win the French Open. I tried to clear my head, let go of thoughts, sit back in the chair and do absolutely nothing.
As Bill Watterson put it “The problem about the future is that it keeps turning into the present.” It is Sunday now and I have another week of vacation left. Eventually this will come to an end and I will return to my job which I love. I will return to my regular routine of waking up at 6, running the same loop around the lake, going to work and try to argue that our work lives could be better if we didn’t over-promise and then overburden ourselves with needless work and then under-deliver, thereby earning the wrath of those who were promised castles. Most of my life is very meaningful, I have a wonderful life outside of work and I am finding a way to make work more meaningful as well, but it is not instantaneous especially when dealing with stubborn management. There will be unnecessary workload and a busy racing calendar over the summer, there will be a lot of time to over-think and be inside my own thought bubble. But for now, I want to be extremely still, extremely calm, completely motionless. Even if it is for a second, or a minute, or a few minutes I want to eliminate every thought from my head, be still and do nothing.
