Alison Curtis: The joy of doing absolutely nothing
Recently I had a moment whereby I was trying to make a lunch, read an email, there was a knock on the door and my daughter Joan was calling me from another room, all at the same time. I literally pressed paused and didn’t do anything for what felt like a really long time but in reality, it was probably only 10 seconds.
But in those 10 seconds, I had a million thoughts and one of those was just wait. Nothing bad will happen if at that exactly moment none of the four things mentioned above get my attention.
Whoever was knocking at the door will leave a message or come back if it is important. The email can wait. No one will starve if the lunch isn’t made at that exact moment. And my daughter might actually decide to use her legs to come and get me if she really really needed me.
I took a deep breath and prioritised. I answered the door first and it was a nice package, sweet. I called to Joan to come to me to tell me what she wanted (reveal it wasn’t anything urgent.) I then put my phone away for 20 minutes ignoring notifications and took my time making a nice lunch.
Afterwards, I asked my daughter to put her iPad down and I did the same with the phone and we just ate and chatted.
Our brains are so full all the time. Mine has certainly been wired to have several tabs of a computer open and going at the same time all day long because of technology and social media.Â
I would read a lot and have long phone conversations with an old fashioned phone on an actual landline.
Going even further back as a child we would spend all day on one task, making a fort, building lego or swimming. Whatever it was our growing minds weren’t scrolling through endless text and images and this is where I do worry about my adult self and my daughter.
I have caught her on her now tablet FaceTiming her cousin while a YouTube video is playing out on my iPad. One day in particular the two screens were beside each other and it looked like she was landing a plane!
That has only happed a few times. But when I caught her I ordered her to turn them both off. She does gets upset with me and says “now what do I do?”
Ever since that moment, 10 seconds, of doing nothing when too much was going on I have encouraged her to do the same. So my answer to her has been “do nothing”.
I am now actively selling her the idea to just sit, sometimes in absolute quiet, for a short while. Have the TV, iPad, radio all off and to even close her eyes if she wants to. I really feel the benefit of this myself. It is like wiping the slate clean and setting restart on your brain.
As an adult, I see things much clearer once I do this. I feel my heart rate drop and I can better figure out the “next step.” I imagine this I can only be the same for Joan.
A few times she has done this, afterward, she usually chooses to get up and do some art or make something instead of reaching for the iPad.
So I think the trick is to remind ourselves from time to time to do nothing. To just sit, to clear our minds, and to be still. It doesn’t have to be for long periods of time, a few minutes has done the trick for both Joan and I. After all, there is a joy in doing nothing.
