Much Ado About Nothing

Sometimes it’s okay to be inert. Sometime it’s necessary. It helps to recharge your batteries and get you centered to tackle the next challenge in running life’s gauntlet.

Back in my own personal Dark Ages, I was gifted at Christmas with a desk calendar of daily affirmations. I’m pretty sure that the motive behind the offering was purely tongue-in-cheek, but I placed the new agey object prominently among the stuffies and Star Wars toys that cluttered up my cubicle. Each day, I’d read the affirmation, and if it was particularly laughable, I’d share it with the person who’d given me the calendar. She was as bitterly cynical as I was (though born in July, she should have been a Virgo), so her response would be similarly derisive to mine and we’d have a good malevolent snicker about it.

One was so ridiculously airy-fairy that I pinned it to my cubicle wall and highlighted this line:

“Even when I appear to be doing nothing, the Universe is working through me.”

The perfect excuse for a disgruntled civil servant to become less motivated, wouldn’t you say?

I realize now what that line truly means. I have since learned that doing nothing is actually doing something. It’s resting. It’s healing. It’s stabilizing jangled energy after a particularly unsettling event or series of events. It’s regrouping to enable my outwardly extroverted helping complex. The tricky part is choosing to do “nothing” over “something else”.

Once again, Ter is my greatest gift. She gets it. She recognizes the signs before I do and is often the first to suggest that maybe we should skip our Saturday lunch-and-shopping routine to leave me at home where I can do a few hours of nothing. I’ll sometimes fight because I don’t want to disappoint her or I think that doing something different will fix my mood, but in truth I suspect she’s more relieved than disappointed when I acquiesce. Who wants to tow a whiny fifty-two year old preschooler all over town in the guise of spending quality time together? Truly, we both benefit from my acceptance that nothing is preferable to something—at least for one weekend.

That silly affirmation clearly struck a chord all those years ago because I’ve remembered it—just as I remember Mr. Spock saying that expending energy running up and down a stretch of green grass and calling it a rest is illogical.

Therefore, do nothing once in a while. The Universe may appreciate being able to work without having to chase you around all the time.