Sunday, September 28, 2008

Frustration in doing nothing

To begin this project I set out to find the room in my house with the least going on. I recently just moved into a new house and there is an almost empty room upstairs that has yet to be turned into a guest room. I went to the "guestroom" and closed the door. I sat next to the matressless bed frame and started my 20 minutes of nothing. This task was anything but easy for me. As an adult with attention defecit disorder, this period of doing nothing was like taking a bullet. Four minutes into it I stated to fidgit and by the seven minute marker I had already changed positions three times. "Does this still count as doing nothing?" I thought. Technically I was doing something because I was moving. But of course I was breathing too. And my heart was beating. And my stomach digesting my breakfast...
So these are the thoughts that began to distract my busy mind into letting me finish out my twenty minutes of nothing without any interruptions. I really thought about the idea of doing "nothing" and discovered that there is no way to be a living being and do nothing at the same time. We are all thinking, breathing, digesting, energy producing and depleting beings and there is no way to control our biological actions. So what I found during my twenty minutes of boredom in the guestroom is that there is no possible way to do nothing, so instead of wasting our time trying, next time we should all be doing something productive with our active bodies and minds!

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