The Value of Doing Nothing
One of the realisations I came to a long time ago when paying attention to other people is how easily people create problems for themselves. It’s a very strange phenomenon because the problem isn’t actually there, but they manufacture a problem seemingly out of thin air just to solve it. I used to wonder why this was the case, but I quickly realised that when it came to these things, it’s unfair to assign a broad answer to specific situations and I ended up letting the question go. Ironically, the very idea of me wondering why people behaved this way was an example of me creating a problem out of nothing just to solve it.
This led me to reflect on whether or not I do this in other areas of my own life, where there were problems that I only thought were problems, but weren’t actually problems. And as I reflected more and more, I realised more and more that all of my problems were just problems I made up, that they were just in my mind and if I didn’t think of them as problems, then they weren’t problems.
Of course, how you look at any one thing doesn’t change the thing itself. A wound is still a wound. But how you look at any one thing does change how you respond to that thing. For example, you can look at a situation and feel despondent, helpless, i.e. view the situation as a problem, or you can look at that same situation and feel that this is simply a challenge that you have to overcome. Same situation, but different outlook and, in turn, different ways of living.
I wanted to learn more about this, not to have a new problem to solve, but just out of curiosity and in reflecting on why we might do this, one of the questions that I eventually asked myself was:
Do we require problems to solve in order to know who we are?
If we didn’t have problems to solve, then what would we do? Probably very little. At least, nothing that we would deem to be significant. Because of this, we can deduce that creating problems to solve is our way of giving our lives significance and, in turn, giving us a way to know who we are.
However, this brings about another realisation. Since we are the ones that are creating problems for ourselves, then this would imply that we are also the ones who are giving our lives significance and therefore, the significance we give to our lives isn’t actually significant, but is something that we have made up. None of it is true, but we pretend that it is true in order to pretend that we know who we are. We create problems for ourselves for something that isn’t true.
What do we do then? Well, probably, learning to not create problems for ourselves to solve in the first place would be ideal. And how would we do that? Again, ironically, asking these sort of questions is still the same problem of creating problems for ourselves just to solve them. But it could be inferred that to not create problems for ourselves cannot come about in the same way as creating problems for ourselves, i.e. it must come about by doing the opposite of solving problems, by not acting, to do nothing.
There is then a value in nothingness, in stillness. When still, the mind quietens and thus, you can’t be thinking up problems to solve. Unfortunately, by spelling this out, you’ll begin to view this as a prescription and try to adopt it to your life, only to fail because you haven’t changed. The value of nothing can only be realised in its own time, in its own way. It cannot be taught, only learned. At least, this is what I’ve learned.
Watching…
The Beautiful Prisoner (1983) - Dir Alain Robbe-Grillet
Mother Joan of the Angels (1961) - Dir Jerzy Kawalerowicz
Quote of the week…
“All of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone.” - Blaise Pascal, Pensees