What would you do if you didn’t have any problems?
It seems like it’s so easy just to go day by day, solving problem after problem, and there always seem to be new problems coming up.
And it’s not every day that I even think about, well, what would I actually do if I didn’t have all these things to work on?
I mean, we have all the basic maintenance of ourselves, sleeping, eating, cleaning.
And then we have the need to keep making money.
I mean, the money keeps going out, so we have to keep bringing it in.
It’s like these daily recurring problems that we can spend most of our time solving.
And then when we have solved the problems for the day, well, there’s always the to-do list, there’s more problems to solve.
There’s always more things to do.
And yet it seems like there’s something at the bottom of that to-do list.
What is at the bottom?
What is there behind the to-do list?
What is there left over if you don’t have all these things to do?
And so I wonder, what would be this a sort of baseline, a baseline pastime, a baseline activity, something to spend my life doing if I didn’t need to spend all the time solving issues that come up.
And so I think it might be useful to think about this, and imagine: what actually would you do?
Because it’s easy to get lost in the day-to-day to-do list, and it’s very satisfying to check items off the to-do list, and feel like “Oh, I’m getting through this to-do list.
This to-do list is getting shorter.
I’m simplifying things.”
But what would it actually end up with if that list ended?
Now, maybe it’s not even realistic to think of, because it’s just so hard to get that to-do list down to nothing.
There’s always more being added on.
And as much as minimalism, simple living: that’s what I’m thinking a lot about these days, is just simplifying that list.
And yet, even the simplest to-do list still has a lot of activities that can keep us mostly busy.
And then sometimes, it seems when there’s nothing to do, then we we go to entertainment as kind of a baseline.
It’s like we want to fill it in.
We want to fill in any of the empty spaces that we have that we’re not spending filling up the time by solving problems.
But what if we imagined what would you do if you didn’t have any problems?
Just ask that question.
And for me, I like to imagine it’s somehow connected with nature.
Maybe I’m sitting on a mountainside going for a walk in the forest, down by the water, just enjoying hearing the sounds of nature, hearing the birds, observing the sunrises and sunsets and the stars, and just observing nature and enjoying being part of it.
Now, compared to all the high-energy entertainment that we’re fed with all the time, it’s hard to imagine that being fully entertaining.
But that seems to me like a baseline.
That is OK.
If I really have nothing else to do, I can simply enjoy being alive.
Just enjoy experiencing nature and the universe that’s around me.
And oh, even as I say this I see a couple of cardinals out the window, see some red birds.
just enjoying that kind of simple appreciation of nature.
And that’s there for us at all times.
And maybe that’s all we need.
So I’d be curious to hear: what is your baseline activity?
What would you do if you didn’t need to spend your time solving problems?
#notodolist #problemfree #lifewithoutproblems