Heroes Not Zombies

We fill our lives with busyness….whether by living the work, eat, sleep, work cycle which has no room for anything else, or by filling our waking hours with tasks, “things to do”, “things that have to be done”.

“What have you been doing?”. “What have you done today?”. “What are you doing tomorrow?”

As Bart Simpson said “I’m a human being, not a human doing”. But we find it difficult just to “be”, don’t we? You’d think we keep busy to escape spending time with ourselves, facing ourselves.

There’s always lots to do, so it’s not hard to spend days so full of activity conducted on autopilot that we are hardly ever really aware of the here and now, hardly ever appreciating the greatest gift, the present.

Sometimes we just need to hit the pause button. Sometimes we need to “take a moment”, to breathe, to wake up, to see what’s around us, to hear the sounds of life, to savour the scents and aromas of the natural world, to feel a breeze, or the sun shining on our skin, or even the rain on our face.

Sometimes we need more than a couple of minutes of this. Sometimes we need a day where we don’t “have to” do anything, so we don’t. Apparently even God took the seventh day off, something which remains a lot easier to appreciate here in rural France than in the consumerist cities.

I often taught patients about the value of scheduling themselves an “artist’s date”, as proposed by Julia Cameron….a piece of time, whether an hour, half a day or a day, where only two rules applied – you have to spend it alone and you can only do whatever you enjoy doing, not something you “have to do”.

Those “bardos” can break up the torrent of business, giving us not only much needed rest, but the opportunity to “wake up and smell the coffee”, or “stop and smell the roses”.

I don’t speak Italian but I remember coming across a phrase – “dolce far niente” – which means “to do sweet nothing”.

Give yourself the gift of sweet nothing. You deserve it. You need it.