Creeping Activities, or It’s Hard To Do Nothing
After about a week of Life Bankruptcy, I'm finding it difficult to detach myself from everything. One thing I wanted to do is find the value in doing nothing. Instead, I've confused needless activity with doing nothing. But I've also found the joy in everyday life in an unexpected place.
The first thing I've noticed is that I'm finding excuses to check RSS feeds a lot more than I used to. This is a bad thing from my point of view. Whenever I'm trying to detach myself from activities, RSS feeds sound like good things to check before I start doing nothing, you know, just in case. What the just in case is, I'm not sure. Just in case something interesting is happening, just in case the world is exploding, just in case a bridge collapses somewhere. Then the awareness of what I'm doing just fades from there and I'm finding myself surfing around the internet. This is something I'm now working on stopping and will probably regulate myself to checking once a day for a while to see how that goes. These are still clutter activities though, and shouldn't be tolerated. I may get fed up with them soon and cut them all together.
The second thing I noticed was that I always thought reading was doing nothing. I realize now that reading lets me escape the everyday and lose myself in a world in my mind. I already have problems losing myself in my thoughts, so doing it on purpose isn't really going to help. I also find the things I'm reading to be completely uninteresting. I tried starting Tristram Shandy, but couldn't get into it. I understand that it's supposed to be random and cattywampus, but I just didn't feel all that up to the challenge.
As far as activities that I'm allowing? Playing with Kelly is number one. That one didn't go long without being added back in. One good thing is that the percentage of time for Kelly playing has gone way up. Meditation time is also up. I'm typically now meditating twice a day for about 20 minutes each.
An activity that I didn't expect to have crop up is watching nature. I used to do this all the time as a kid, but stopped at some point. When walking through the park, I might stop and look at a flower now and then, but not really observe nature. Now I find myself looking out the windows at the birds digging through the grass or rain as it runs between the bark of the truck of a tree. I sat outside with my tea last Saturday, listening to the rain fall through the trees and the birds singing the background chorus. I'm not going to start writing poetry about it or anything, but it's the kind of activity I've been looking for; worthless, frivolous, perfectly calming, and fulfilling.
