The brilliance of doing nothing at all
When I was drinking, doing nothing was defeat. I wasn’t literally doing nothing; I was postponing doing things I should have been doing, such as paid work, self-work, home-work, etc. and drinking instead. Of course I got some things done, but it was a slog as I did it all through the haze of alcohol or post-drinking blahness. So I considered sleeping in, napping between meetings, closing myself off to the world in so many ways as being defeated by my addiction.
It’s taken me a while to associate doing nothing with something that’s part of self care. We’re supposed to be productive, right? I’m supposed to be busy with paid work, active socially, and enriching myself through good reading, creative activities, and all that. Also, I’m in the latter half of my life expectancy, so doing nothing is particularly itchy. I don’t have as much time left to dilly-dally as I did when I was younger. I’m haunted by the Henry Rollins quote:
“No such thing as spare time, no such thing as free time, no such thing as down time. All you got is life time. Go.”
But even when I was doing my best creative work, I had learned from the lessons of people who had come before me who taught me that taking breaks was good for creativity. And I mean breaks—staring out the window for an hour, or going to the park, or doing something completely different, hopefully enjoyable, than whatever the “work” at hand is. For me, it’s always proven true and has worked wonders for whatever I’m doing, whether that’s writing music or a creative brief or building something for my home.
The nagging negative aspect of this is the expectation that we have to be productive in everything we do. So while taking a break was necessary to support that productivity, that break often included drinking, which was also roundly negative. So taking breaks has taken quite a hit in my brain over the years, and even when I was doing it, I felt guilty or otherwise less “good.”
Now that I have a bit of sobriety under my belt, I have shed the association with drinking and doing nothing.
I’ve also correlated some thoughts I’ve had for a long time about sleep and dreaming. I didn’t dream in any way that I can remember when I was drinking heavily. My sleep hygiene was certainly awful all those years, and while I’m sure I did dream at some point in there, it was essentially irrelevant.
In college, I took a series of courses on Shakespeare from a professor who was really into dreams. He told us to keep a notebook by our bed and set an alarm for 4am or some unholy hour for a college student, write down whatever came up, then go back to sleep. He would have us connect our homework with this: e.g. if our task was getting into Iago’s character in Othello, we would try to associate our dreams with something Iago might be thinking. It was a useful way to break out of the text and think differently.
Around the same time, Jack Dangers remixed the song “The Snow” by Coil and subtitled it “Answers Come In Dreams” which was supposedly a way of sneaking LSD into the name (get it? - Answers Come In Dreams = ACID). Regardless of the cheeky drugs reference, that phrase has always stuck with me. Because answers do come in dreams for me. And in getting sober, I got that back! If I ponder a difficulty I’m having or some other kind of puzzle as I drift off to sleep, I do sometimes get a solution of some sort upon waking. This isn’t magic of course, it’s just my brain making thousands of associations while I sleep and my waking mind picking one out of my dreamstate.
This whole thing about dreams is all an elaborate way of justifying doing nothing, even though sleep is actually necessary and I would be doing it regardless.
What about while I’m awake? Doing nothing is rest. Rest is good. It’s standing in the park while my dog’s running around or staring out the window or lying on my back on the grass and watching the clouds. It’s all the stuff I used to do more of before I carried an incredibly powerful computer in my pocket everywhere I went or worked long hours staring at screens, only to swap to another screen for entertainment before bed. It’s giving my brain time to do its own thing without processing content someone else created.
It’s what I did before I wrote this. I sat in this chair and looked at the tree outside my window, drifting in the breeze in the golden late-afternoon light. I think it’s important for me to do this.
I just remembered something else from college. My roommate and I had our desks on opposite sides of the room, next to windows that overlooked a river. We would take silent smoking breaks together, seated in our desk chairs, looking out the window at the trees and glimpses of the river beyond them. Ten minutes later it was back to our respective studies, but I know it recharged us a bit.
If all I have is “life time” per Mr. Rollins, it’s healthiest for me to do some of it staring into the distance, doing nothing.
I love you,
David
