I Was Learning to Be Myself

Jul 19

A seven-year-old draft about doing nothing, pleasure, and
the question that shaped everything that came after.

Wow.

I just came across a time capsule:
a draft of a blog post I wrote on June 21, 2019—just over seven years ago.

I had recently resigned from my research job after being placed on medical leave.

A few weeks before I left, Jeff, my boyfriend at the time, challenged me to spend a little time each day "doing nothing."

He’d been encouraging me to “do nothing” for several months.

On most days, I struggled.

What did it even mean to “do nothing?”

Do I play dead?

Sit or stand while staring at the ceiling?
Isn’t that, in and of itself, doing something?

Maybe I’d meditate...but, again, that’s still doing something.

By the time I wrote this draft, I was on a 20-day streak of doing nothing.

Or rather, I was on a 20-day streak of investigating what "doing nothing" meant to me.

So, my first day of doing nothing consisted of me reading articles in Psychology Today about doing nothing.

Some articles suggested meditation, taking a walk in nature, listening to music, reading a book.

Again, to me, those are all activities that amount to doing something.

What I found across various articles is that "doing nothing" isn't really about doing nothing.

It's an invitation to do something pleasurable.

And that's where I parted ways.

For someone accustomed to measuring her worth by what she accomplished, choosing pleasure for its own sake felt like rebellion.

The Italian term for doing nothing is la dolce far niente, meaning the sweetness of doing nothing. To the Italians, doing nothing means doing something pleasurable, like taking a nap, sipping a glass of wine in a cafe, or making love.

Now I was getting somewhere.

But la dolce far niente still didn’t make sense to me.

Doing something pleasurable isn’t doing nothing.
It’s something.
Something pleasurable.

It’s revolutionary.

It reminded me of lust.
Lust isn’t just about sex.

At the time, I was influenced by Lust: The Seven Deadly Sins by Simon Blackburn.

Blackburn defines lust as “the enthusiastic desire, the desire that infuses the body, for sexual activity and its pleasures for their own sake” (p. 19).

I was developing a course about reclaiming the gifts of the seven deadly sins and found myself especially drawn to lust—which, in retrospect, still tickles my fancy.

But lust can be more general.

It's the desire for pleasure for its own sake.

The sweetness of being lustful.

La dolcezza di essere lussuriosi.

Now that is something I could get on board with.

I’d rather do that than “do nothing.”

Is it just semantics?

Not to me.
It’s a different orientation to doing something pleasurable.

We often speak of "doing nothing" as though it were the absence of activity.

But perhaps doing nothing isn't about the absence of action.

Perhaps it's about the absence of obligation.

The freedom to do something simply because it delights you.