Blog # 183<\/p>\n
DON’T JUST DO SOMETHING. SIT THERE<\/p>\n
I looked up the origin of this quote and found a number of possible
sources. I first heard it when I was reading the teachings of a popular Eastern\u00a0guru. It made me laugh as I thought about the opposite messages I\u2019d had during\u00a0my life. A lot of us have been taught that \u201cdoing\u201d is better than \u201cnot doing,\u201d\u00a0that being productive is better than doing nothing. But I think \u201cnot doing\u201d\u00a0gets a bad rap. We\u2019re not meant to expend energy without taking time to\u00a0rejuvenate. We\u2019re not meant to work all day without sleeping at night. Even the
land needs a fallow season, a period to restore its fertility if we want it to\u00a0grow crops. These aspects are part of the duality of life. The dark and the\u00a0light. The high and the low. The male and the female. The \u201cdo\u201d and the \u201cbe.\u201d<\/p>\n
I was recently telling Rhoni, one of my nearest and dearest\u00a0friends, about a time when I had just finished writing a celebrity memoir. I\u00a0was worn out, ghostwriting takes a lot of stamina as you speed toward an\u00a0impossible deadline and try to keep a number of people happy along the way. Once\u00a0it was in the publisher\u2019s impatient hands, you get to exhale. So there I\u00a0was, sitting in front of my computer, exhaling and feeling listless. I couldn\u2019t\u00a0write, I couldn\u2019t move, but I also couldn\u2019t sit still. I needed to rest but\u00a0\u201cdoing\u201d had become so habitual, I felt anxious and paralyzed, both at the same\u00a0time.<\/p>\n
The phone rang. It was my mother. \u201cHow are you?\u201d she wanted
to know.<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019m exhausted,\u201d I said. \u201cI have to figure out how to do\u00a0nothing for a while so I can get my energy back. It’s really hard.\u201d<\/p>\n
She changed the subject and three days later, when I was
just getting the hang of letting go and taking it easy, I got a letter from\u00a0Mom. She had advice for me. \u201cI try do at least two unpleasant tasks every day,\u201d\u00a0she wrote, \u201cjust to keep up my discipline.\u201d I remembered that whenever my\u00a0parents were lying out in the sun, having a gin and tonic after a long day or\u00a0on a Hawaiian vacation, they called themselves \u201clazy bums.\u201d<\/p>\n
So what is this \u201cbeing productive\u201d all about? Can we feel\u00a0good about ourselves when we\u2019re relaxing? There are different kinds of feeling
good about what we’re doing. It feels good to pay the bills so they don’t turn\u00a0off our electricity. It feels good to teach and be of service. But it also\u00a0feels good to just sit there. To breathe and read a good book. To paint or\u00a0write or dance or do something as simple as staring out the windows. A friend\u2019s\u00a0mother was in town from back East and she was restless and anxious. My friend\u00a0said, \u201cSit here mom, and look at the view.\u201d Her mother harrumphed, gave it the
wrist and said, \u201cI saw it last year.\u201d<\/p>\n
Sometimes it\u2019s helpful to go to extremes to make a point.\u00a0When I feel like I\u2019m not being productive and wasting time, I think about
Buddhist monks who spend their time in a cave, meditating, sending compassion\u00a0and good will out into the world. They don’t consider that a waste of time. To\u00a0them, it\u2019s a high calling.<\/p>\n
\u201cDoing\u201d is fine, we enjoy creating and being with friends,
but \u201cbeing\u201d is highly underrated. If we learned anything during this pandemic,\u00a0it was how to stop chasing our tails and sit still. It\u2019s a discipline in\u00a0itself. It\u2019s a way to learn about what we like and what we don\u2019t like. What we\u00a0want and don\u2019t want. When we relax and stop stressing, healing can happen.
Compassion becomes easier to find for ourselves and other people. So let me remind\u00a0you once again:<\/p>\n
Don’t just do something. Sit there.<\/p>\n
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Blog # 183 DON’T JUST DO SOMETHING. SIT THERE I looked up the origin of this quote and found a number of possiblesources. I first heard it when I was reading the teachings of a popular Eastern\u00a0guru. It made me laugh as I thought about the opposite messages I\u2019d had during\u00a0my life. A lot of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":1929,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1930","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-blog"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.andreacagan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1930","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.andreacagan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.andreacagan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.andreacagan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.andreacagan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1930"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.andreacagan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1930\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.andreacagan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1929"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.andreacagan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1930"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.andreacagan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1930"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.andreacagan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1930"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}