If there is something that the pandemic has taught me, then it is the art of wasting time. For a major part of my life, I have been driven by goals and milestones. Looking back, the source of all that energy seems to be the greatest mystery.
Lately, I have been feeling like a dead fish sailing through life. With a stable job offer in hand, I knew I had something to be grateful for. But since the joining date was months away, I felt like I had an endless supply of days to fill with meaningless activities.
If I speak from my heart, I felt like the span of time I had ahead of me was like a desert but whenever I took a handful of it in my fist, it slipped by faster than ever. The more I tried to fill my day with meaningful activities, the more meaningless it seemed.
And so just like that, without any specific goal in my mind, I started writing. Since I did not have any specific goals in my mind, I let my mind wander and I could actually express myself with my writing.
After writing some pieces of content, I garnered the confidence to put it out for people to read and judge.
In a span of two months, I set up a website and have started writing and publishing regularly. To be honest, I am not sure how far I will go with this blog and writing. But it was kind of fascinating to see how I turned from absolute chaos to a little bit of order almost without an effort.
The culture today glorifies business, preaches productivity, and hates the idea of sitting idle. So much so, that we have forgotten how to sit idle.
But it wasn’t always this way. Idleness wasn’t a problem until the recent boom of books and content that promote productivity over anything. History is proof of the fact that playfulness fuels creativity and that in turn paves the way for great inventions.
When we are not mindfully invested in a task, our mind wanders. Creativity that flourishes at those times is normally suppressed by the everyday list of to-dos.
Having started writing regularly, I realized that I had always had this idea at the back of my head. It’s funny how I could get so engrossed in doing something that I almost never realized the amount of meaning the same thing adds to my life.
I hope the major takeaway from this article is that idleness is not always passive. Sometimes sitting idle and taking some time to analyze our doings becomes important.
A tip is to take a step back, from time to time to analyze what you are actually doing.
If you’re creating a product, take a step back and analyze if the product has any value other than its monetary value.
If you’re providing a service, look out for how people actually feel after receiving your services.
Over the course of the last few months, I have come to realize that only after you give yourself some time to relax, the spontaneous flow of creativity will start flowing again. That will not just pave new opportunities in our life but also helps us analyze our existing systems in place.