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The Art Of Doing Nothing.
Of all of the things we try to do, nothing is the hardest. In fact, doing nothing is so difficult, that most people go their entire lives without even attempting it.
And why should they? Humanity has spent its entire existence doing things. We’re really good at it. We hope we dream, we invent and we plan. We think of things and then we build them. We solve problems. We get things done. What’s the problem with that?
Well, for starters, there’s the fact that for all of the good things that our addiction to “doing” brings, we also spend a lot of time helplessly doing things we know we shouldn’t. Even when they hurt us. We fight and we worry. We fear and we hate. We destroy things and we say things we don’t mean. We fail to live up to our own expectations. We do all of these things too. And like I said earlier, we’re really good at it.
The fact that we’re so compelled to do things, that we’d rather be doing something that hurts us than not doing anything at all, explains why meditation is so often misunderstood. We’re so conditioned to use our minds, so used to everything being an activity, that it’s hard for us to conceive of something which is not an activity. Instead of allowing meditation to be an opportunity to rest the mind, we make it into a problem for the mind to…
