The Art of Doing Nothing

I willingly accepted the task when Tim asked me to write this article ‘The Art of Doing Nothing’; after all I’ve always took for being able to do this - or at least thought I could. Over a 3 day period I began to seriously think about it – Can anyone or anything really do nothing?

It began a realisation.

I looked at the plant outside my window. It seems to be doing nothing, besides being blown around by the breeze. Yet it’s performing a valuable task in cleaning our air and bringing forth life. It’s a home to insects and provides the hummingbird with nectar every morning. It adds value to the whole scheme of things on earth.

Let’s look at a ‘higher’ life form, I decided; my cat. What the use of being a cat? It eats, sleeps, look cute, rubs up against you when it wants attention and scratches up your shoes and furniture. It does all these apparently useless things. Yet it too plays a part in the scheme of things. It was priceless in keeping rodents in check on board ships in olden times and today it still plays a part in controlling pests.

Can anyone or anything REALLY DO NOTHING then? I mean, even a dead body is doing something – decomposing.

Then I realised that these is a distinction between doing and being.

The plant is simply BEING a plant and my cat is just BEING a cat. DOING something is simply not in the consciousness of the plant or the cat.

A tree does not wake up in the morning to review what it has to do for the day. In being a tree it automatically does what it does. I know my cat does not have an appointment book to schedule meetings with the bathroom lizard.

Everything else on the Earth, besides man, it seems seem to be in a state of BEing. Only we humans seem to not include our ‘Beingness’ in our daily need to do things. We call those who do enlightened beings. Most of us are so caught up in our DOingness that we have forgotten to simply BE.

What does it mean to BE a human being? Hmmm, I wonder if that word was created to remind us of our ‘being’. If life was about doing, perhaps we should have been called ‘human doings’, instead.

So how does one BE?

I know that waking up in the morning to send your child to school, as you chide him for only getting 95 out of 100 marks, and then rush to beat the ERP before it ‘traps’ you, as you curse the driver who cut into YOUR lane – isn’t it.

I know that forcing yourself to talk to people you despise in your office but you have to because that’s your manager and it’s bonus time; having only one hour for lunch, hovering over the bitch that’s yakking away, occupying YOUR seat or being rostered to leave for lunch 10 minutes earlier so that you can place tissue packs on tables in the hawker centre, otherwise it’ll be occupied by that bitch over there – isn’t it.

I know that living in worry that interest rates won’t be increased otherwise your home mortgage instalments would go up by another $1,000; or feeling stressed because you’ve just taken possession of a $1million apartment and Al Queda’s threatening to blow up Wall Street, half a world away – isn’t it.

And what has all this doing done?

When computers were first heralded, there was lots of talk of humans being free from the bondage of work; of quality time spent with family, because computers would remove the need for many menial and repetitive tasks. That hasn’t happened.

Instead stress levels have gone up, more and more of us are getting sick with cancers, depression and heart disease. Families are more segmented. Divorce rates are at an all time high. Now they’re telling us that the retirement age may have to be raised because despite all that lifetime of work, many of us will not have enough money saved up to live on.

My friend bought a car recently. We use to catch up for coffee often, prior to that. Now she seems to have no time because she’s busy doing more things with the car.

And now we hear that with all that ‘doing’ as a result of us pumping noxious gases into our atmosphere, whilst we deforest the earth, and take resources from her, the Earth is fighting back. Perhaps Mother Earth too is finally fed up with these inhabitants who only seem bent on doing more and more damage to her.

She’s raising her temperature, melting her ice caps, sending killer storms to rain heaps, to cool the Earth down. Maybe freeze the ass off most of us so that we can finally get back to our state of being aligned with the scheme of things – again – and this time begin to do things that is in alignment with our being – our TRUE PURPOSE on Earth.

Have you ever noticed a bee? It goes from flower to flower looking for nectar to feed the hive. It does this day in and day out for 5 weeks and then it dies. What was its life all about? Was it simply to collect nectar so that it’ll feed new pupae, which will develop into new bees that’ll then do the same and die in 5 weeks? Seems pointless doesn’t it?

The Goal of the bee was to seek and gather nectar. But what really is the TRUE PURPOSE of the bee? The bee was put on the Earth to POLLINATE. Its action of bumbling from flower to flower causes life – fruits, seeds, pollination, growth – life stems from its BE(E)ing.

And if our doing has been causing more and more damage and destruction, maybe it is time we stopped all this doing and only do the things that are in total alignment with our being. Maybe it’s time to let the Universe take over and begin to live as human beings instead of human doings. And the Earth will begin to heal herself.

Then maybe when we stop doing, we too will start healing – from diseases like cancers, from wars, scarcity, from right or wrong, from inequality, from hate – and begin to love our humanity, our Being.