Not Doing

A fresh day with a fresh lead in my mechanical pencil – nice. Since my Dad passed away two months ago, my creativity has been at a sort of standstill. I haven’t spent much time on painting or writing. I keep overworking and holding myself to rigid standards of perfectionism and responsibility, never giving myself the time I need to relax, dream, play, and explore. This busyness has helped me move through some of the grief by way of sheer distraction. I feel quite flustered and empty now, though, and I feel it’s time for a change of tack.

“So I know the good in not doing” is a line from the Tao Te Ching that I often repeat to myself. I repeat it because of how counterintuitive it is to everything I learned growing up and everything that society continues to spout at me. To me the line means not that we should stop all forms of action, but that some of the best experiences in life come from “nothing.” Or in the words of the great philosopher Winnie the Pooh, “doing nothing often leads to the very best of something.” Wandering around a farm full of horses on foot and alone, spending time in a mossy cemetery, watching Leo dig, rearrange, and turn until he gets comfortable in his truffle bed, cruising along the sandy seafloor with a pufferfish alongside, bathing off the back of a boat while sails are raised and the cool water rushes by, a heart-warming, genuine human conversation, sitting next to a friend and looking through her sketchbook with her, reclining in a hammock with my niece and looking at the sky together, and typing the words of my book at the green-flooded window of the local bakery. Sometimes something as insignificant as a cup of coffee can be memorable and profound. William Blake’s line “to see the world in a grain of sand” seems apt.

Not doing isn’t about laziness. Certainly, let’s keep rising at the crack of dawn to tend to the horses and do a hard day’s work; let’s keep kicking goals if that’s what our feet are intrinsically motivated to do. But let’s not forget that the greatest, sweetest experiences of our lives will not come from these strenuous efforts of ours. They will come from seemingly nowhere, when we’ve done nothing at all to deserve them. The biggest moments of our lives are empty enough to hold everything.