I can, of course, only speak from my own personal experience but here it is: whenever I try to actively make use of free time it easily turns into ‘productive time’ of some sort. I water the plants or do my dishes, decide to start a laundry cycle or something similar. I rarely find myself planning to do nothing and succeeding in it. On the other hand, I also find myself doing nothing ‘by accident’ and drifting off into a meditative mindset where my thought just flow and take me to places I need to discover. Those tend to be lines of thought I would never have pursued of my own volition, and that makes it all the more important to access them!
Of course, exploring your mind is not the only thing you would do with your free time. I wonder what experiences we all miss because we are too busy to let them happen naturally? Besides meditation, how often have you shunned certain activities because you didn’t think of them as worth your while? That walk up the hill, the phone call with a friend that is long overdue or preparing a luxurious time in the candlelit bathtub with nothing but your own hands to explore yourself without giving any thought to anything else? Are you procrastinating things that are of no obvious benefit but to your own wellbeing? Things that make you feel a little guilty? Activities that appear frivolous and unnecessary? Those are exactly the things that you need to do to feel yourself and enjoy your own company. And by doing them you’ll be more available to others because you are more yourself than you would otherwise feel and be. Next time you realise that you are rushing to start a new project to fill the time, or you run out of productive juices, maybe consider doing something that seems completely crazy (within reason, of course) and only serves to separate you from the humdrum of daily life. You may just be better off for doing that than mindlessly continuing on the trodden path you were on before.
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About me
These are my own thoughts on aspects of my work I feel strongly about. Archives
September 2021
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