The Gentle Art of Doing Nothing

Mar 24, 2009 by Dr. David Field

Ezines are peppered with articles on how to do this, how to do that, how to do the other. But one of the greatest skills of all is rarely or never mentioned: how to do nothing, how simply to relax, not to feel that this, that or the other must be achieved today, tomorrow or even the next day. Note that I am writing of doing nothing, not trying, failing and achieving nothing!

Why is doing nothing one of the greatest skills of all? One obvious enough reason is that learning how to do nothing allows you to recharge your batteries. But, probably of more importance, the ability to do nothing is an important skill because it enables you at some other time, perhaps just the next day, to appreciate that you have achieved results. That is to say, learning how to do nothing can be a great aid in learning how to work effectively and measure that you have done so. You can really only understand and be at peace with yourself that you have done something good when you can contrast it with a true state of having done nothing. The acquisition of this zero reference point is therefore important. It is like the calibration of a scientific instrument and must be done with precision for reliable measurement. There is of course little new in the idea that doing ‘nothing’ – or at least the absence of action – is important. This concept has been ritualised in religious belief for more than two millennia, be it Friday, Saturday or Sunday or saints’ days.

The problem of course with nothing is that is indefinable. I remember an incident that took place in a shop in the Grand Bazaar in Istanbul. In the Grand Bazaar, it is really quite impossible to browse without interruption. A few seconds after entering the shop I was accosted by the owner. ‘What are you looking for, sir?’ he asked. ‘Nothing, nothing,’ I replied. ‘Ah! unfortunate sir,’ the man replied with a lugubrious look, ‘we have no nothing here. Everything that we have here is something.’ I must say that I tried my very best not to laugh. He had after all put his finger on an important point. I could not be looking for nothing. How indeed could I recognise it if I found it?

Thus, how do you know when you are doing nothing? For nothing may have substance. It is more than mere absence. Rather it is the acknowledgement of absence, the awareness that you are doing nothing. The profound poem: ‘As I was going up the stair/I saw a man who wasn’t there/He wasn’t there again today/Oh, how I wish he’d go away’ sums this up rather well. There is substance in absence. How then can you substantiate the claim, when asked what you did on Sunday, that you did ‘nothing’, when you do not know what this nothing is? Actually, such a reply more likely reflects your wish not to tell your questioner that you papered your daughter’s bedroom, put in a new central heating system and composed a pop song that is already in the Top Twenty. You find yourself suddenly shy of being such an achiever. You secretly know that you should have done nothing, but were unable to achieve it.

The natural state of Man, I would affirm, is to be sitting in a deckchair on a beach, with a cocktail in one hand and an unread newspaper in the other, surveying the deep blue sea, which is lapping at your feet. This state of luxurious laziness requires however cultivation. For some of us our Protestant work ethic forces us from the deckchair, if only to help others to set out their own deckchairs and then blow up a beach-ball for the children and so on. Our conscience somehow forbids us to do what we really know to be right, to do nothing and to do it at considerable length. Why only today, a Sunday, I really have been doing practically nothing but then I felt that I must achieve something – so I began to write this article. Indeed this article is what mathematicians would call a one-deep loop, the very act of exhorting others to do nothing requires that you break the rule that you are propounding.

Now that you have read this far, you may very well be thinking something along the following lines. This article was meant to teach me how to do nothing and it has taught me, well, nothing! Moreover the author has stated that the ability to do nothing is an important skill and it is therefore even more reprehensible that barely a single useful word of advice has been given.

However the contrary is true. It is always good to teach by example and you have learnt an important technique of doing nothing. What better a way could there be of doing nothing than reading this article?

David Field is a professor of Astrophysics at the University of Aarhus, Denmark. He has published numerous articles in many Astronomy and Physics journals. His most recent novel, The Fairest Star, the third installment of his Friends and Enemies Trilogy, has just been published. For more information, please visit David’s website here.