Doing Nothing

The most impor­tant thing you will do today is noth­ing. Out of noth­ing comes great thoughts, dis­cov­er­ies, and insights. “Noth­ing” is the layer between two work­ing some­things that has to be there for any­thing to get done. Being merely busy is the ticket to the shal­low frit­ter­ing away of life. It takes delib­er­ate plan­ning and dis­ci­pline to truly do nothing.

I learned a long time ago that if I did not do noth­ing I would not get any­thing done. Instead, I would drift from one lit­tle task to another half-heartedly. I would go through the motions with­out a bit of soul. When you take noth­ing seri­ously, you get it all done and done well. This is not as easy as you might think. There is an art to doing nothing.

The Sab­bath came right off the bat in the cre­ation story. Even the old Soviet Union dis­cov­ered that peo­ple had to have a day off to accom­plish any­thing. Though I sel­dom take a day off, I “Sab­bath” one-seventh of the time. I do it delib­er­ately. It is not watch­ing TV or surf­ing the Inter­net. It is just inten­tion­ally doing noth­ing — not pray­ing — not clean­ing the house — not any­thing. Noth­ing. Just nothing.

Jesus spent an amaz­ing amount of time alone — right in the mid­dle of his most demand­ing times. He had no day timer. His fol­low­ers were often unable to find him. He seemed most at home where there was noth­ing (desert moun­tains are pretty bleak). Like the cre­ation com­ing out of that void in which the unseen God dwells, he would appear out of lonely places to per­form miracles.

Leav­ing room for noth­ing is how God gets into the story. Doing less more often gets more done than doing more all of the time. It is one of the many grand para­doxes of life. Lots of peo­ple are pretty messed up these days. They are plugged into things con­stantly and fear the space in which God meets them.

Your high­est action today is to do noth­ing. What­ever arises from those moments will have a higher qual­ity. More noth­ing — more qual­ity. Still­ness with no thought or action…then you know EXACTLY what to do.