Just returned from two weeks of holidays. I spent one week on in the Malmö area where I live with a few friends from Holland and one week on canoeing on the lakes around Alingsås. Today, my friends dropped me of in Malmö and I have two weeks of holidays left, which I will spend on “doing nothing”.
Before going into that, let me tell you that being able to empty my agenda from basically everything was quite a trick and I paid a price for it too. But since it has been, what?, four years or so since the last week of doing nothing, I was happy to pay it and do the work to empty my agenda and, more importantly, keep it empty. I really have been looking forward to these weeks for the past eight months.
However, now that they have arrived, two questions are bugging me. First of all, as Robin one of my friends, pointed out, will I still be able to do nothing, or will I go nuts after a few days. Well, I guess I’ll find out the next two weeks, and obviously, the answer is related to the second question: how do I do nothing? After all, it has been four years or more since I did nothing for longer than a day. Before and after that time, I spent all serious amounts of spare time on programming my note-taking software and building databases. This time, I will resist that urge and somehow it has grown into a less urging urge. Still, one or two days … one never knows.
Today after being dropped of, doing nothing meant: sleeping for a few hours in the afternoon, cleaning up the holiday stuff of the past two weeks, doing the laundry, a few hours of climbing, some shopping, and writing this blog. After that: making a phone call and watching a movie. Except the sleeping, it all doesn’t sound like doing nothing to me.
Maybe, I’ll have a better day tomorrow, but I doubt it. There is still e-mail waiting – I had a peek already but managed to answer only one e-mail. I also need to install myself in my new apartment, to which I moved just before my holidays, and find my way in my new place and neighborhood. That goes in the ‘doing something’ category, I admit, but I’ll also go to the beach or a park tomorrow – which I would label ‘doing nothing’. Tomorrow and the day after will be good, weather-wise, so I’d better make use of that …. hmmm …. that suddenly somehow sounds like doing something again.
This doing nothing may become more complicated than I thought. I may keep you posted, but I cannot promise it, because I might decide that doing nothing also means no blogging.
Meanwhile, all tips, suggestions and proposals are most welcome.
