Art of doing nothing (or how to feel great on a Monday)

Monday morning. You just walk into your office. As you settle into your cubicle, your colleague asks about your weekend. A few others around you are half-listening, in anticipation of your reply. Even though you know very well what you did, it’s not immediately clear what to say. It will probably be, as usual, a mix of what actually happened together with some made-up stuff, if it sounds interesting and worthy enough to be shared. Either way, what is expected is a laundry list of things you did, with something spicy towards the end to pique people’s interest. ‘And on Sunday, I went to see a concert performed by the London Symphony Orchestra, it was lovely, especially with the three monkeys that were brought in from the zoo.’

When you plan ahead for your weekend, you typically try to fill the imaginary time slots with activities. Some people use their work calendars to fill in every hour of the day with something. This is to make sure they are ‘productive’ during their ‘time off’ from the hectic work week. From a rhythm perspective, the weekend often becomes an extension of their work week. Monday mornings feel tiring.

What about the idea of ‘doing nothing’? Doing nothing is, after all, a lot different than our everyday definition of doing nothing. When we say we did nothing, it usually means an absence of an activity. Staying at home, watching TV, doing the laundry, picking up groceries, all typically fall under the ‘doing nothing’ tag. But what about truly doing nothing? What about reducing your entire day to a long 6-hour walk in the forest? What if your operating mindset was to minimize the number of things you did in the weekend? What if you had an imaginary quota? I can only perform 10 activities today. You would probably slow down when making coffee in the morning. You would take a lot more time eating lunch. You would extend that conversation with your wife.

Remember the goal of the experiment is to reduce and do as little as possible. You are not thinking you should be doing anything else or be somewhere else, or wanting. Eastern sages always say that there is no deeper happiness than wanting nothing. Desire is the opposite of peace.

Keep an empty head, so you can observe clearly. The less you do, the more you can observe.Doing nothing is the ultimate minimalism.