Mark Gerard's Therapeutic Massage

When was the last time you did nothing?

I mean nothing. I’m not talking about watching television, reading a book, gardening, or even going for a walk. All these things are driven by some kind of purpose.

If you’re like most people, the last time you did nothing was when you were a child. Maybe you skipped stones along the glassy surface of a lake and watched the ripples skim their way ever outward until they disappeared or kissed the shore. Maybe you lay in a field and contemplated the familiar, cottony shapes drifting by in the azure sky –puffy turtles, cupcakes, and angels.

Doing nothing seems like such an indulgence in today’s world of wi-fi and never-completed to-do lists. Yet I think it’s the key to getting in touch with your inner self. When all the noise and distraction falls away, you’re left with … you. And there’s a peace and a power within you … there’s even a music within you … that is intimately tied to the universe.

Civilization and all its trappings – family, work, technology – only serve to sever that tie, or at least block it. Then how are we to listen to the universe? And how is the universe to listen to us?

John Tarrant, a Western Zen teacher, explores this in his prose piece Not Doing. “When we cannot see how healing or the next step in our lives will appear,” he wrote, “and no longer know what we can expect, the step we must take just emerges, out of nothingness, like the grass … When we truly do nothing, a fertile, widening silence appears.”

This sense of “opening up,” of discovering answers in the universal silence that lies within us all, fascinates me. It’s a state of awareness that’s free of judgment and fear and wide-open to creativity. I believe it’s the key to finding the core of ourselves, and the key to our happiness.

I urge you each day to put time aside to do nothing. And see who you discover.