(Learn from my mistakes.)
The other day, some readers asked me about the relationship between doing nothing and being creative.
Reader 1
How does the nothingness become filled with creativity? I feel so lost!
Reader 2
Every one of these points is right on target! The hardest part for me is relaxing into non-productivity. I would love to see you explore this issue even more deeply.
The real issue is that little voice telling me I should be up doing something productive. I’m working on talking back to it rather than unquestioningly obeying it or continuing to relax and feel guilty.
I promised to do this article delving into the subject.
Let’s start.
Don’t feel guilty about wasting time.
Wasting time is necessary to save time.
What?
Yes, you read that right. If you don’t waste time, you will waste years of your life. It’s happened to me.
I spend seven years with the wrong person.
And then, I spent ten years in a long-distance relationship that went nowhere (I am very stupid or innocent, depending on how you look at it).
During both relationships, I would do anything that would allow me to prioritize my partner instead of doing what I love: writing.
If I had wasted a couple of hours every day walking around alone instead of giving my time away to my exes and former bosses, I wouldn’t have wasted 17 years of my life. I am sure of that.
When I started dedicating myself to doing nothing for a couple of hours a day, I began to see what everyone else saw but me: that my whole life smelled worse than a public bathroom.
Benefit 1: Wasting time helps you distance yourself enough to see your life in perspective. And seeing with perspective will keep you from spending years persevering in the wrong direction.
Wasting time makes you more creative than an 8-year-old with markers.
Free time = Creativity
Creativity = innovation
Innovation = progress
Ergo, if you want to progress in life, you have to spend time not being productive. Period.
When I was little, my day was full of responsibilities between school, homework, and extracurricular classes.
But on Saturday, I didn’t understand why my parents made me go to my room to do my homework after lunch if the next day was Sunday and there was no school.
In my room, I did everything but homework: I put a mirror at the entrance of my room to see what was on TV in the living room, I made up battles with the dolls, I wrote poems to the prettiest girl in my class (Gema 🙂 or drew comics in my notebooks.
That’s what the mind does when you force it to do nothing.
“Think about the person you like?”
Yes, but the mind also starts looking for anything to entertain themselves, and that’s where the best ideas come from.
Benefit 2: when we get bored and relax, our brain generates original ideas that can change our lives.
Doing nothing = to the mind in order
When I get pissed off because something doesn’t go my way, the worst thing I can do is to stay in the office.
So I go for a walk, to the gym, or the pool.
I don’t do it just to avoid strangling (metaphorically) some client/supplier/my brother, who is a pain in the ass.
Not at all.
In those post-badblood moments, my mind takes the opportunity to 1) organize all the inputs of the day and 2) have mental discussions with the people who have caused me discomfort.
I call this “Untying the knots.”
There are many unresolved conflicts in my life (and yours). I usually swallow and repress my emotions to avoid them.
But the resentment is still inside me.
It’s like accumulating unanswered emails in my brain. Do it long enough, and your mail (your mind) will run out of space to receive more mail (you will stop thinking clearly, and you will screw up your work).
Spending time doing nothing makes my mind have those mock discussions inside my mind, and 1) I get my thoughts in order and 2) I lower my anger level.
It’s like cleaning the email box of pending emails, sending a lot of them to the trash carpet, and flagging others as junk mail (there’s the majority of my brother’s messages 😉
Benefit 3: Your brain is a computer. Doing nothing helps you delete cookies, junk mail, and all those apps acting in the background and stealing your cache memory: envy, anger, etc.
Takeaway
Dear Reader 1: In the same way that you need to exhale the air to breathe in new air. You also need to empty your mind to fill it again with new ideas.
Dear Reader 2: now that you understand the benefits of spending time doing nothing and how it will benefit your life, you can’t feel guilty about spending periods unproductive. On the contrary, you should feel guilty for not doing so.
A virtual hug
AG