Just be
My personal stress level and the one in my home has been on a constant high level the last couple of months. (To be honest, I can’t remember when it hasn’t been on a tense strain anymore.)
Apart from the usual problems that come with such a situation such as tense reactions, much less patience in everyday contacts, mental exhaustion (my reading subscriptions are piling up beside me) etc. there’s another thing that heightens the vicious cycle: isolation.
When we tend to throw ourselves into work, or tense work situations ask us to do it, then the first thing we’re cutting out on is the down time. Or rather the non-oriented down time.
Maybe this is just a typical intellectual’s problem, but having down time that is not itself filled with clearly denoted things such as reading something specific or watching something specific, is something that’s necessary. It’s the simple difference between a filled silence or relaxation and a true empty silence where silence suffices itself to a degree.
Meeting friends, just to meet them. Not to DO anything together, but just to be together for instance is one of those things where I surprised myself thinking ‘…but, what use is it…? We should be doing this or that…’
I find that automated train of thought of mine completely shocking, because I try to excel at the method of not finding a use or an intended goal in everything. Something that is so natural to our modern society. Sometimes just doing something for itself and without the knowledge of an immediate gain is much more important than actually achieving something on your to do list.
Why? Because we’re not defined by what we can achieve, but rather by what we can let go. Ultimately it’s only in those unplanned moments that the truly good things happen. Not because they’re better than the plan you made to achieve your degree or make your love happy, but because the unexpected and the unplanned is something the mind needs to even be able to project, plan and aim. If planning was all that was needed for a good life, a full life, then everyone could do it.
Be courageous and allow yourself the gap in planning, the silence in doing and the liberty to just… be.
Great article yseult, thank you for this (and the mobile version).
Just started reading the dutch version of a book from Henri Nouwen, called “REACHING OUT Three Movements of the Spiritual Life” (assignment for Spirituality). Do you know this book? One of the things he writes about is our need to be together to ‘do things’, us being afraid to be alone and his way to grow in to other ways of being alone and having friends.
Thank you, Ronald. No, I don’t know either the author or the book unfortunately, but it sounds like something I should look into.
I’m glad you liked it. Of course being together doing things is extremely important, because it’s through the things that we live through together, where we share experiences, that we forge a common story. But I feel that learning to go for the unplanned and the ‘let’s not do anything’ is just as important.
Your welcome
Summarizing the book in English is a bit difficult for me. But I can really recommend it, easy reading (at least in dutch). But I am afraid you have a long list of “have to read sometime”.
Yes, but that doesn’t keep me
It’s on my amazon list now.
This special horror vacui of ‘useless’ time I especially found in friends who grew up in a vivid Protestant environment. As if they could’nt feel the immense sensuality and abundance of just being, without doing anything. One of these friends once said, that he couldn’t waste any minute without doing something useful, without thinking, learning, discussing, without STRUGGLE for knowledge. He hated ‘idleness’. But, ah, I’m a great idler, I love the special fertility which blooms only in unintentionality.
Thank you for that comment, Diana.
Now that you say it, I can completely agree that there is something profoundly ‘protestant’ about the horror of idleness. But as always, when talking about protestantism and mainly also Calvinism, the next step is: success. So indeed… there can be no immaterial success. And that makes success in… just being… or even in the silence or contemplative life rather impossible.
Funnily enough, I just followed a couple of conferences by Sir Anthony Kenny on Aristotle’s conception of eudaimonia, the good life and… the contemplative life. How about this: without silence, without to unordered and without the un-aimed, there can be no aim, no success and no meaningful word, since it’s through their dichotomies that we even realise their value in the first place.
Looks utterly platitudinous, I know.