Going on about nothing...

Sometimes you just need to get away don’t you? Just get away and forget whatever it is that you want to forget, or have forgotten to forget, or can’t be bothered enough to even forget the thing that you were trying to forget. Find one of those places that you can simply blank it all out, one of those places where there’s need to worry, or enjoy the enjoyable, or plan or even think.

A place to do nothing.

Nothing.

What’s that then?

I find it very hard to do nothing, even when I try to do nothing I find myself doing something. I can’t sit for more than a few minutes without having to get up and do something. When relaxing in the garden, I’m either dead heading plants or pulling weeds or wandering up and down trying to do nothing and not succeeding.

Maybe it’s the environment, there are places where doing nothing is easier than others. Not the beach though, I’m rubbish at doing nothing on the beach, two minutes of sitting and then I’m off looking for shells or pebbles or checking the rock pools for tiny swimming fish, or collecting rubbish to make some such nonsense with.

Even when I’m watching television, which is as close to doing nothing as I get, I have to check my mails or Facebook. Unlike the television I don’t seem to be able to switch off. As a child doing nothing was frowned upon, it was expected that you must constantly be doing something and it didn’t really matter what it was just as long as you didn’t waste time staring into space and daydreaming. Since then doing nothing seems not to be an option for me, I only wish it were. I think I’d like daydreaming my time away.

Yes, if I could just do nothing then maybe I could channel that nothingness into something creative like Wordsworth who, wandering aimlessly and lonely as a cloud, came up with that poem about golden daffodils. Or, as Dali used to do, I might be able to empty my mind and see what it held inside.

Maybe if I could simply not be busy, just do nothing, then I might actually achieve something.