Seize The Day - Or Not

Posted on 29 December 2007

I have spent most of today doing nothing. I haven’t got up and at them, I haven’t gone balls out and I definitely haven’t been seizing the day or anything else that needed seizing for that matter. I didn’t get out of bed until almost 11.00am, which is over 4 hours later than normal (and probably the latest I have got up for about 5 years!) and other than doing a meditation I’ve done very little at all.

To start with I was cool with all this though because it was almost planned. I wanted to have a day with nothing particular to do, no books to mail off, no client notes to write up and no life coaching to be done. The only thing is that it is now late afternoon and I feel like I have wasted time that I’ll never get back. We only get so many days on this planet and at the end of it to the best of my knowledge we’re not met at the Pearly Gates by an Angel with a clip board saying:

“Hmm, Brownson eh?” Points at clipboard with pencil and says ”I see you had multiple days here, here and here that didn’t quite pan out for you. There was a lot of time wasting, much procrastination, a hissy fit here and there and a more than a few arguments. What have you got to say for yourself?
“Sorry sir”
“Are you sure you’re really sorry?”
“Absolutely I am”
“In that case I was wondering, now you know better, whether you’d like them all back to make better use of?
“Seriously?”
“No not seriously you imbecile it was an Angelic joke. You had your opportunities the same as everybody else, now get inside and quit whining, nobody gets a second chance on my watch”
“Damn angles”
“Oi! I heard that, watch your lip or you’ll be downstairs. And anyway I’m an Angel not an angle, that’s something altogether different. Next you’ll be asking whether we have desert after dinner.

So I’m in a quandary. Should I be able to let go and just ‘waste’ a day doing nothing and feeling good about it? Or should I flow with my instincts, which are much more aligned with achievement, accomplishment and getting stuff done? The weird thing is, I’m not sure what the answer is unless it’s that I’d like to be able to do nothing occasionally and still feel good about it.

That’s it! Just the act of writing this has made me understand that it’s not wasting time per se that is bugging me, it’s the realization that I’m not that comfortable doing it and anyway what does it even mean to ‘waste time’? Don’t answer that by the way because we could end up down some philosophical alleyway never to be heard from again. I once read a book on Philosophy that broke down all the different schools of thought. The problem was at the end of each section I’d be thinking “Yeh that’s the one for me, that makes great sense” Then I’d read the next chapter and think “Oh no, forget Chapter 1 this guy in Chapter 2 really knows his stuff, this is the school of thought for me”. That went on for about 28 chapters at which point my head exploded. Those guys made such great arguments, anybody would think they did nothing all day but sat around stroking their chins and pondering stuff. I doubt Descartes or Kant ever worried about wasting time and if they did, I bet they managed something a bit more significant than one blog entry about it.

It’s good to be able to let go, chill, do nothing and not feel guilty about it from time to time. The alternative is to spend all our waking hours feeling like we have to achieve something to justify our existence. I don’t want to go down that path so I think I’ll do some work on feeling good about doing nothing. Now surely that is goal worthy of aspiring to.

Enjoyed this post? Please share it!

Digg it | Stumble it |

 

Post a Comment

Name

Mail (will not be published)

Website

Enable CommentLuv which will try and parse your last blog post, please be patient while it finds it for you

Notify me of followup comments via e-mail