Written By Alan Good
Perhaps you feel empty, disconnected from the world and from all meaningful things. You can’t go out, or hold down a job, or get out of bed for long, or even read much to “pass the time.” You are alone, without friends and relatives, or far from them. You don’t even understand the Internet and don’t want to. How could non-doing possibly help you when you are already not doing anything and it is driving you nuts?
You are probably doing a lot even though you are unaware of it. You may be “doing” unhappiness, boredom, and anxiety. You may be spending at least some time—or a great deal of time—dwelling in your thoughts and memories, reliving unpleasant moments from the past. Are you “doing” anger or resentment or self-pity?
If so, time can weigh on your hands. When you don’t know what to do with all the time you have inner whirlpools of the mind can drain your energy. They can be exhausting and make the passage of time seem interminable. Loneliness is a risk factor in and of itself for both ill health and mortality.
T. S. Eliot stated, “Ridiculous the waste sad time…”.
Non-doing simply means letting go of our attachment to everything including our thoughts as they come and go. It means letting yourself be. If you feel trapped in time, non-doing is a way for you to step out of all the time on your hands by stepping into timelessness. In doing so, you also step out, at least momentarily, from your isolation.
By connecting with yourself outside the flow of time, you are already doing the most meaningful thing you could possibly do, namely to come to peace within your own mind, meeting your own wholeness, reconnecting with yourself.
Look at all the time you have as an opportunity to engage in the inner work of being and growing. Even if your body doesn’t work “right” and you are confined to the house or to a bed, or you feel somewhat diminished from your former self, the possibility is still here to turn your life into an adventure and to find meaning in each moment.
If you commit yourself to the work of mindfulness, your physical isolation might take on a different meaning for you. It’s not so much the inability to be active in outer ways, but it is the thoughts we have about our condition that can cause us grief.
Meditation can bring a new perspective on yourself, one in which you are seeing optimistically, reframing the time that weighs on your hands as time to do the work of being, the work of non-doing, the work of self-awareness and understanding.
There is no end to this work, of course, and no telling where it might lead. But wherever that is, it will be away from suffering, away from boredom and anxiety and self-pity, and toward healing. Negative mental states cannot survive for long when timelessness is being cultivated. How could they when you are already embodying peace?
And if you are able-bodied enough to do at least some things in the outside world, dwelling in non-doing will likely lead to insights as to how you might connect with people and activities and events that might be meaningful to you as well as useful to others. Everybody has something to offer to the world, something that no other person can offer, something unique and priceless.
That, of course, is one’s own unique being. If you practice non-doing, you may find that, rather than having all this time on your hands, the days may not be long enough to do what needs doing. But that requires that you let the doing come out of being. In this work, you will never be unemployed, whether you have a job or not.
