At Grant Snider’s very wise Incidental Comics, we found THIS brilliant idea: take a day to do nothing. Only we’d change one word in the last panel of Snider’s comic about the worthy “pursuit of aimlessness”

Grant Snider
Grant Snider

We don’t believe “aimlessness” equals boredom. So we’d just change “boredom” to…

“doing nothing”…

…which can lead to a wonderful state of dreaminess.

Pablo Neruda’s Keeping Quiet furthers the healing notion. If you really want to do nothing swell, listen to it here:

Now we will count to twelve
and we will all keep still.

For once on the face of the earth,
let’s not speak in any language;
let’s stop for one second,
and not move our arms so much.

It would be an exotic moment
without rush, without engines;
we would all be together
in a sudden strangeness.

Fisherman in the cold sea
would not harm whales
and the man gathering salt
would look at his hurt hands.

Those who prepare green wars,
wars with gas, wars with fire,
victories with no survivors,
would put on clean clothes
and walk about with their brothers
in the shade, doing nothing.

What I want should not be confused
with total inactivity.
Life is what it is about;
I want no truck with death.

If we were not so single-minded
about keeping our lives moving,
and for once could do nothing,
perhaps a huge silence
might interrupt this sadness
of never understanding ourselves
and of threatening ourselves with death.
Perhaps the earth can teach us
as when everything seems dead
and later proves to be alive.

Now I’ll count up to twelve
and you keep quiet and I will go.

 

Quiet…aimlessness…doing nothing…dreaming…

THOSE are fine activities to build into life.

 

Neruda poem via Brainpickings

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