We’re coming to the time of year where the air gets cooler, the skies get darker, and everything starts to fall back into a routine.
Summer vacations have ended and until the holidays roll around, most of us have plans to get organized and accomplish as much as we can to finish out the year.
While there is nothing wrong with being productive, I think it’s easy to get so caught up in day-to-day tasks that we miss the time that is passing by.
How many times have you gotten to the end of the day and realized you can’t recall more than a few details of what you did or ate that day?
Have you ever driven home and been so on auto-pilot that you couldn’t recall how you made it — thinking to yourself, “What route did I take? Did I run a red light?”
More often than not though, we don’t have these moments of realization.
The time just passes, the details fade, and somehow it’s mid-September and we don’t even know how that happened — where did the year go?
In the fast-paced world we live in, when we have a free moment in our day we feel obligated to fill it — we check our phones, scroll through social media, read an article, send a text message — anything we can think of to keep ourselves from boredom.
Time spent without something to do makes us anxious.
We have become uncomfortable with stillness. Uncomfortable with simply existing.
True stillness still has something to offer to us, though.
Now let me clarify that I’m not talking about meditation when I say stillness. Meditation is taking time to actively place yourself in the present moment — working to control your thoughts.
Meditation is a practice worth doing and I recommend it wholeheartedly, but it is still doing something.
I’m instead talking about purely existing in a moment.
The moments you allow yourself to stare out the window, lose yourself in thought, observe the trees blowing in the wind, watching the life on this planet buzz around you.
In these moments you are you, existing in the world around you.
What do these moments of “doing nothing” have to offer?
1. They allow us to slow down. Instead of participating in the millions of things you could be doing, you are able to take a step back and take a breath.
2. They allow us to anchor ourselves. You are a complex living being on a rock that’s hurling itself through time and space — you are also lucky enough to somehow exist in a time in history of relative civility.
Anchoring yourself means appreciating your own unique position and what a miracle it is to exist at all. Placing yourself in the bigger picture will make checking your newest photo for “likes” on Instagram seem less important — shifting the way you feel.
3. They give us freedom of thought. Think of some of the great discoveries of the rules of the planet, like gravity and measuring volume through displacement.
Gravity was discovered in a moment where Sir Isaac Newton was lost in thought under an apple tree. He had a question in the back of his mind, but wasn’t actively seeking an answer to it. If he had been checking his phone, would he have connected the dots when the apple fell?
Volume is something that was once thought impossible to measure on an irregularly shaped object. Archimedes was tasked with finding the volume of a crown and didn’t know where to start. He had this question in the back of his mind, but wasn’t actively seeking an answer to it when he lowered himself into his evening bath. If he had been texting a friend, would he have connected the dots when the water spilled over the tub?
(Roll with me on the gravity example, I know this is debated.)
What if you took a few minutes in the afternoon to just exist without distraction.
Just allowing yourself to be you, right at that moment in time, existing.
What would that look like? Would that make you uncomfortable? Could you do it without reaching for your phone?
There’s a lot we gain as technology advances, but there’s a lot we stand to lose.
What discoveries could we make if we weren’t so caught up filling our day with activities? How many times have the answers to questions we have in the back of our minds been right in front of us, but we were distracted and didn’t notice?
Productivity is a good thing, but that does not make its opposite a bad thing?
I challenge you to take a few minutes today of stillness and see what it does for your mood and how it impacts your day. Will you end the day with a better idea of how your time was spent? What dots will you connect when you quit actively pursuing answers?
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