Yesterday I did nothing

inspired by a newsletter I read

One of my favourite mind-expanding and leisurely things to do every few weeks is to read posts by Maria Popova on the Marginalian, formerly Brain Pickings. The stuff she writes about is often what tends to eat at my consciousness lately; the meaning of humanness type content. I enjoyed the latter third of today’s newsletter, about ‘the art of lying fallow’. I think this was especially relatable because I was doing a lot of fallow-lying yesterday.

The dictionary definition of lying fallow is ‘to remain uncultivated, unused, unproductive’ for a period of time. Actually I do a lot of this; a byproduct of not having an extraordinarily busy life at the moment. I will withhold judgment on whether this is a ‘good’ or ‘bad’ thing - for now, it just is what it is.

This month (Ramzan) has been a rather fallow month. Fasting more regularly this year for the first time in years, life has revolved around the rhythms of sehri and iftari and all that this implies for sleep schedules, energy levels, and digestive systems. Afternoons have been slow and lazy, and evenings are spent feeling just a little bit more alive again before going back to sleep. As a person who thrives in the early morning, it’s been strange. But it has also been what I see as a necessary reset - for one, I realize drinking coffee does not have the same emotional flavour to it when I do so later in the day. It is a sacred act for the morning, for what it represents - something about to begin. A small realization, but as a creature of habit (all of us, but me in particular), this calls into question a number of the things I otherwise would do on autopilot. So this month is serving as a rethink.

Yesterday was one of those lazy afternoon days, in which I had no classes, work, or creative inspiration. Much of it was spent napping or pretending to nap, but also in just sitting and staring at the wall really. I felt so lame for a few seconds - imagining my highly productive friends seeing me in those moments of nothingness. I’m not used to filling idle hours with TV shows or movies, so if I have nothing to do and I don’t feel like reading, I really will be found doing nothing.

If we’re judgy about it, those moments can feel quite icky and uncomfortable, this desire to do something with ourselves but not knowing what, or in actual fact, not even wanting to. I’m beginning to see it as a state of the body conserving energy, while the mind grapples with its lack of activity and tries to will the body into a state of action it does not want to be in. Increasingly, I am paying heed to the wisdom of the body. She always knows. Judging by how I feel today (in contrast to yesterday), while I woke up in a state of sleepiness, I was still able to tend to my body through exercise, and step by little step feel a sense of inspiration that has infiltrated through my morning, now seeping into the early afternoon. It allows me to read, write, imagine, and feel excited, about what I cannot even say. It is purely internal, and that is something I’m coming to learn is everything.

A little quote from the newsletter I talked about earlier goes as follows:

“…how we govern our interiority - how we tend to those processes as they shape us - shapes every outward expression of our lives.”

Maria Popova

This spoke to me because as I sit here in this phase of my life, turning more inwards than outwards and reflecting on how I define, say, the last year of my life, I see that while things were happening on the outside to me, how I felt about all of it is how I remember it. In realizing this, I recognize the importance of tending to my inner world. Sitting idle on purpose isn’t necessarily the ‘answer’, but perhaps rather noticing when the body intuits that sitting, or doing nothingness, is the only way to be right now. It’s what makes space for the necessary and inevitable creative somethingness.

This isn’t a new idea either. Lately there’s been a lot of online discourse about the pushback against hustle culture, on slowing down, etc etc. But I don’t think any of it can really resonate or make sense unless it suddenly does make sense - a state of transition, low energy followed by high energy, and then as a result seeing that all of life is just a series of transitions to be savoured if we just learn to sit with them. Another quote:

“It is a strange and uncanny result of urban civilization and the impact of technology on human experience that leisure has become a pursuit and an end in itself. It has gradually become an industry, a profession and an imperative social need of the individuals in modern societies. Everyone strives for more and more leisure and knows less and less what to do with it. Hence the emergence of a colossal trade in organizing people’s leisure.”

Masud Khan

If there is no aimless pursuit, then there is only what exists in the present. Imagine a world where we all had the luxury to roll with the waves of energy our bodies communicated to us. I think, if nothing else, we’d be less neurotic about what we think life should look like, and resultantly, a whole lot calmer. In the face of this universal unknownness of existence, instead of frantically searching for answers, we could let this calmness, moment to moment, show us the way.