Doing Nothing

Monday's ordinary thing is doing nothing, which really isn't doing nothing. It may be stopping to stare . . .

What is this life, full of care,
We have no time to stand and stare?
--from Leisure, by William Henry Davies

Or it may be sitting by a window. Or providing a lap for a cat. Or doing nothing may mean arranging spices in a neglected nook of a cupboard.

Doing nothing, when done best, is doing just one thing.

This cools the multi-tasking fever we all seemed to catch a short time ago. In the words of Walter Kirn:

"Everyone else was going places, it seemed, and either we started going places, too—especially to those places that weren’t places...but were just pictures or documents or videos or boxes on screens where strangers conversed by typing—or else we’d be nowhere (a location once known as “here”) doing nothing (an activity formerly labeled “living”).*

There are a multitude of ways to do nothing, and I hold they are all worth our while. Life is worth our while.

Write about doing nothing.

*From the article "The Autumn of the Multitaskers," in the Atlantic. (Thanks to the astute and talented Anjali Banerjee for the tip.)