Can you imagine just being able to sit, maybe look out the window, maybe just be there, and be happy? Such a simple thing, but it seems like it’s not easy to be in that state.
It almost sounds like you have to be some kind of a Shaolin master to be able to be happy without doing anything.
Because it seems normal to interpret the state of doing nothing as boredom.
And, you know, if we’re looking at it like meditation, well, that’s like work, that’s training, it’s exercise.
You know, I’m struggling, I’m working, to be able to sit without doing anything.
But I wouldn’t choose to just sit, as if that in itself could be a pleasant thing.
It just seems that the normal idea of happiness always involve some kind of activity.
So there’s something missing here, I think.
And I’m certainly not claiming to be any kind of Shaolin master, able to just sit and smile and total contentment.
I don’t even know if Shaolin masters do that.
But there just seems to be a great potential here that so many of us are missing out on.
Because imagine you could be happy without doing anything.
Shouldn’t that be an option? Shouldn’t that be something that’s available to us? Why does doing nothing have to be boring? It seems like it’s all, of course, what’s going on in the state of mind.
If we feel unsatisfied, restless, something’s off, something needs to change, something needs to be done, then sitting to do nothing is kind of painful, because we’re just face to face with all that discomfort.
So doing things, being stimulated in some way, is a way of distracting ourselves from the uncomfortable feeling of just being there by ourselves.
I mean, how much of the entertainment and leisure activities that we do are about distraction, about giving us something to do other than sit quietly? I mean, really, it’s hard for me to take it too seriously, because the thought of sitting without doing anything, it just sounds like boredom.
I mean, could you imagine actually just like staring at a wall? At least if you’re looking out the window, ah, you know, I can see a tree, you know, I can maybe see a squirrel once in a while, maybe a bird will land on a branch, and I can listen to the sounds of traffic and the noises of the neighbourhood.
But even that is such a low level of stimulation, it’s hard to imagine it really being taken seriously as entertainment.
And yet, still it seems like there’s a value there in being able to be bored, in being able to not be distracted, able to simply have a moment to sit and have nothing going on.
I would be curious to hear if anybody does this.
It’s something that I would like to try doing more.
And maybe if it doesn’t work, if it doesn’t, you know, fill me with joy, and if it becomes intolerably boring and uncomfortable, maybe it will at least give me some kind of clue as to why.
Why am I not content? Why am I looking for a distraction? What is it that I want to be distracted from? But it seems like this boredom is a good place to start kind of making like- it’s like it becomes a vacuum.
It’s like when you have that emptiness, now we can really see, what are we going to fill that emptiness with? But if we always just automatically fill the void with whatever we can to distract, then we never really get to see what we really need.
So I’d be curious to hear if you have any experience with this, and it’s something that I’ll have to work on more.
#donothing #boredom #simplicity