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The art of doing nothing... and why it seems impossible for adults

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What I miss most about my childhood is doing nothing — hours and hours and hours of doing absolutely nothing.

I distinctly remember those summer afternoons spent in my grandmother’s home, watching ants. For what seemed like hours I would follow the path of a little black ant — along the cracks in the concrete. I remember lying on my back by the living room window and spending hours squinting past the translucent glass and into the sunlight, watching the rays make shapes. Not reading, not playing, not speaking, certainly not being productive. Just being.

Unlike the children of today, my parents wholly accepted all children must be bored no matter how they felt about it — much like school, it was something to be endured. Childhood was a long experiment in boredom.

They did not see my time as something that needed to be filled, and did not see me as a creature who needed to be entertained. And perhaps, because of this today I long to have that time again. To do nothing. To stare at a blank wall or sit with my face against a window for hours. And I am unable to manage it.

One of my favourite writers and thinkers Alain De Botton says: “The act of staring out of a window is an exercise in discovering the contents of our own minds”. We do not, in reality, know how we feel or think or what is REALLY going on in our minds. It requires a fair bit of time of ‘doing nothing’ to let the answers to these questions float to the surface.

Jenny Odell, author and artist, says in her book: “In a situation where every waking moment has become the time in which we make our living, and when we submit even our leisure for numerical evaluation via likes on Facebook and Instagram, constantly checking on its performance like one checks a stock, monitoring the ongoing development of our personal brand, time becomes an economic resource that we can no longer justify spending on ‘nothing’”.

A few weeks ago, I started to schedule a few hours of nothing into my day. But I seem to be consistently failing at defending my nothing time.

All logic tells me that I should afford myself this simple luxury. That this is my act of rebellion against the ‘attention economy’. I know how much I need to be unproductive. But that does not make it easier. I am hardwired to constantly hustle.

In variably I have the urge to combine my nothing time with a run, or a book, or another person — as if ‘nothing’ is not enough. “I will sit on the couch”, I say to myself, “From 10 to 11 am, doing NOTHING”. And then my phone beeped, and the bubble burst.

My sister is a mother of three children under the age of seven. I reckon she hasn’t had more than 30 seconds to herself in over seven years. I imagine she would laugh at my efforts, so I haven’t even dared to tell her.

In an effort to find the answer, I did what we all do when we have an impossible question. I googled it. Find a spot, put away your phone, start with smaller blocks of time, says the internet.

I am going to try again this week, and especially, this long weekend. Wish me luck.

wknd@khaleejtimes.com