The fall afternoon shadows grab the lawn just tightly enough to reveal splinters of a burnt autumn sun. I’m sitting on my back porch soaking up the view while engaging in an activity that often eludes me: doing nothing.
With my bare feet crossed on the outdoor chaise, I think about all the things I should be doing. My mental list starts clicking like a ticker tape—make dinner, do the laundry, check the kids’ homework, pay bills, work on a writing assignment. It’s always something. Sitting on the porch watching the sun set is rarely on The List.
But today I’m having a chance encounter with stillness. And it feels nice. Somewhere in life we each get the message that doing trumps being every time. In our culture, it’s almost a natural tendency to fill up our hours with activity and motion. And our penchant for action sends a dangerous message to the next generation of Blackberry-driven adults. Study hard. Do more. Even play hard. You’ve seen it, maybe even participated in it—the well orchestrated 3-year-old play group; a teenager overscheduled enough to tire the likes of Lance Armstrong, the overstressed 16-year-old cramming in classes and activities so it looks good on her application to college.
As a little girl, I used to sit in the yard pulling apart blades of grass, then braiding them, then pulling them apart again. I could do this for hours. Now my kids want to know how much longer they have to stay outside because it’s hot and sticky and weird bugs, (they’re called flies, children), are bothering them and why can’t they play their Nintendo game one more hour?
Whatever happened to just lying down in the grass and looking up at the sky? I made it a full-time activity when I was growing up. But I left that behavior when I grew up to become someone more serious, more work minded, less play minded.
So why did we stop the cloud watching? I tell you what happened—we forgot there’s beauty in looking up. We failed to find the fun in deciphering faces out of clouds shaped like school busses and flowers and the big one shaped like Richard Nixon.
I once spent a week alone in Taos, New Mexico. My adobe was a room that didn’t have a television set or a phone. Just had a comfortable bed, a fireplace, and a writing table with plenty of paper and pens. Implicit instructions were given that we could not have roommates and had to adhere to three quiet hours a day without contact with anyone. Oh boy. The first few days were difficult. I had much to say. I wanted to make friends and play games by the fire. But our retreat facilitator had other things in mind—like creating a place for each of us for meditation, inspiration, reflection, with the hope this would inspire our craft.
By the middle of the week, quiet had became a good friend reminding me of the beauty of what peacefulness looks like, smells like, feels like. I started to notice the landscape. Upon returning home, my husband and children joked they had never seen so many photos of trees and flowers. Neither had I—but they were right in front of me. My one-week respite changed me and it changed my family, too. We work hard at doing nothing on a regular basis. The kids still tease me with a sing-songy poem, “Things sure are different ‘round the house, now that mama’s back from Taos.”
Different indeed. I think it’s time to re-adjust on the chaise. Gotta get back to doing nothing.
