Today I am thinking about nothing.

Nothing in particular. What doing nothing means. What having nothing means.

Generally, people seem to be very scared of nothing. The requirement to be doing something all the time is especially tyrannical in the middle of our lives. It can take a concentrated effort to slow down and do nothing. Some people simply can’t handle it. Not comfortably at any rate.

We are all aware of how limited our time is on Earth. That can make us anxious about “filling” every minute of every day. That is not to be confused with living “fully” each day. Our anxiety can grow as the years begin to speed up, quickly at first, and soon they start to fly by.

Joni Mitchell’s advice to a young man in her song The Circle Game captures this: “And they tell him, Take your time, It won’t be long now before you drag your feet to slow that circle down.”

Death is perceived as the greatest nothingness of all. Unless we believe in reincarnation, we may believe only darkness and oblivion await us after death. I am not so sure of that anymore. The Universe is far too complex and convoluted to let us off that easy. But, I don’t really know. No one does.

So in light of life’s inevitable endpoint, and if we’re lucky, we start to slow down. After years of frenetic dedication to raising kids and making a living and staying in the mainstream of life, I stopped. One day, I found myself looking out my window at a pleasant scene whilst doing absolutely nothing. I wasn’t thinking about anything in particular. I was just sitting.

You can’t imagine how foreign and far-fetched that scenario was for a Type A personality like me. I was steeped in the virtues of the Protestant work ethic. If you were too, you may get how odd and slightly terrifying doing nothing is.

This is the paradox of the human condition. We set goals early in our lives for the things we want to have and accomplish in our lives. Many of us metaphorically break our necks to get what we want.

But we rarely sit down and take a hard look at what we really want and need. Then we make our lives more difficult and less peaceful by comparing ourselves to our peers. If we don’t have what they have, we can get scared and sad. When we ignore the wisdom of stopping to smell the flowers, the memories of our life might be but a blur.

Stopping to smell the flowers can be the very place where we find joy and feed our sense of wonder. Only by stopping can we marinate our souls and senses in the wonder of what is all around us. We often fail to recognize that the little things are really the big things in life. I blinked and my children were adults. They will never be little again and it makes my heart hurt. I missed out on many small and tender and precious moments with them in my drive to survive and succeed.

These days I can be perfectly happy doing nothing. That is progress for me. I grab the chance to do absolutely nothing whenever I can get it. It is not that I dislike being busy or having something valuable to occupy my time. I actually quite like being busy. But these days, it is more of a choice. When life gets too crazy, it is up to me to slow it down.

It has become necessary to consider what avocations make me happy. Beyond the necessary mundanities of day-to-day life, I mean. There are only a few. They could be considered silly and frivolous pursuits but they are mine. I no longer need to justify them or justify my existence.

I have a friend who is a genius at this. He walks in the world at his own pace and is directed by his own interests. He goes on long daily walks just to exercise. He has been known to sit for a couple of hours on a park bench and just watch what is going on in the world and the people around him. I have always admired and envied him for that capability.

So I’m thinking I’ll sit awhile today and just watch the world go by. With no lives on the line, or mandatory issues that require my attention, I’m free to do that. It likely isn’t what the expression carpe diem was supposed to mean. But instead of “seizing the day,” I’m just gonna sidle up to it with a cup of hot tea and watch it amble by.