The Wisdom of Doing Nothing

Sitting quietly, doing nothing,
Spring comes, and the grass grows by itself.
~ Basho

Of all the fears that terrorize the human heart, perhaps the greatest is the fear of nothing. It is the concept that none of us want to deal with: non-existence - the terror that everything we believe ourselves to be will one day disappear, that everything we know and love will be gone, forever, on the day that we die. Perhaps even more frightening than the fiery visions of Dante's hell is an afterlife of nothing ­– an abyss of blankness in which we sit alone forever, bored out of our skulls.

Even in life, we flee from the idea of “nothing.” We are raised with the ubiquitous expectation that we “become something,” that we “do something with our lives.” We look down upon people we deem lazy, who are “do-nothings.” Nothing is synonymous with meaningless, purposelessness, emptiness – all of which have a deeply negative connotation in our culture.

This fear and dislike of nothing is not, however, shared by all cultures. In many Eastern spirituality traditions, particularly Zen Buddhism, there is in fact a great respect for “nothing”. The technical term in Buddhism for the state of interdependence in which all beings exist is Sunyata – which literally means “emptiness” or “the void.” To our Western ears this sounds like a highly depressing concept, which is why Buddhism strikes some at first glance as being a nihilistic philosophy. But that is the furthest thing from the truth.

Let’s take Japanese art as an example for a moment, which was highly inspired by the philosophy of Zen. In a Japanese painting, the empty space, the background, is often deemed just as important as the subject or the foreground. The “nothing” is just as important as the “something”. The depiction of a flower, a mountain, or a river is not considered complete unless it is viewed within the context of the space in which it lives.

What is the subject, foreground, or something of our lives – as we normally conceive it? For most of us, it is the perceptions, thoughts, and stories created by our egos. In this story, we tend to view ourselves as the center of the universe. If we then try to seek out the center of who we are, we usually point to the general feeling of “I” that resides within us – usually located somewhere behind the eyes and between the ears. This “I” feeling has a biography, a name, a job, worries, anxieties, hopes, fears, the whole thing. It’s who we are – or, at least who we think we are.

If that is the subject or foreground of our lives, what is the background? Obviously, it is our environment, our surroundings, the society in which we live, and the natural world around us. But it actually goes much deeper than that. For many of us, our bodies feel like the background. We feel that we are in our bodies, but we often do not consider ourselves to be our bodies. Therefore we use possessive words to describe our body: “my arm,” “my leg,” “my big toe.” We say “I have a body” not “I am a body.” We consider ourselves (the “I” or the ego) to be separate from our bodies, separate from the environment around us, separate from the Universe itself.

What we generally call “doing something” in life is when we feel deeply rooted in the stories and thoughts of our ego. For instance, we set a goal for ourselves, we accomplish it, and we feel a sense of pride. But a goal, in and of itself, is just a mental concept. Can you reach down and pick up a “goal”? Can you hold it in your hand? Of course not, because “goals” don’t exist in the real world. Yet the accomplishment of “goals” is very real to the ego.

The ego loves to create standards for who we should be or how we should live and then constantly measure our progress in how successfully or not we are meeting that standard. This constant measuring and judging is one of the greatest sources of stress and anxiety in our lives.

When we aren’t busy spending our lives doing this perpetual goal-setting, measuring, judging, labeling, etc. – what then is there left to do? Well, to our egos, the answer is obvious: nothing. If we aren’t constantly striving for something, life has no significant purpose, no meaning, right? Well, the ego is pretty sure of this, but does that make it necessarily true?

What happens when we do what the ego refers to as “nothing”? – when we sit down and meditate, when we lay in a field and watch the clouds drift in the sky, when we sit by a creek in the middle of a hike and just watch the water roll on by? According to the Puritan work ethic so longed praised here in America, this activity is worthless: it isn’t productive, it isn’t valuable, or, in other words, it isn’t helping you make money. But is the sole purpose of life to make money, to make “productive use out of one’s time”? This is the same attitude that found it acceptable to steal land from the indigenous people of the country because they weren’t “doing anything productive with it” – meaning that they were instead living in harmony with it, which is something still a mystery to the Western mindset.

When we are doing “nothing,” we are actually connecting to something larger, something greater than our narrow-minded ego and its obsession with goals, judgments, and productivity. We connect with the organism of our bodies and with the larger organism of this living, breathing Planet Earth.

When we do this, we are in fact doing a quite a profound “something.” We start to feel a deep peace and joy filling our bodies and our spirits. It can be a strange feeling at first, and yet it feels so familiar. We tend to actually remember this feeling from childhood, in our carefree days of exploring our backyards and neighborhoods without with worries and neurotic fixations of adulthood.

How sweet it can feel to stop the ceaseless energy of this crazed modern technological world. To stop and breathe. To stop and simply take a look around at the flowers, the trees, the contents of a room. To do this feels like a new birth, an immaculate re-conception of what it feels like to be alive.

I think it’s important that everyone stop and do nothing for a least a few minutes each day. Turn off the cell phone, turn off the computer and the television. Put away the books and magazines. Forget about your To Do List for just a little while.

Sit down somewhere and enjoy doing nothing. Take a seat on a park bench and just watch the trees wave to you in the breeze. Feel your breath coming in and out of your body. Allow yourself to get in touch with how pleasant it feels to simply be alive.

Allow the wisdom of your body and the earth, the wisdom so drowned out by all the inner noise, to begin to speak. What you will hear and what you do with that wisdom depends entirely on you. I could attempt to explain my own experience with this wisdom, but that takes all the mystery and wonder out of it.

It’s best that you simply tune in and listen for yourself.

~ Matthew Foley