Free Time

Two recent quotes have struck me recently. “We are living longer and thinking shorter” and “what we resist persists”. Both seem to me to talk to the way our society has changed, and how we as individuals feel more stressed in our day to day lives.

We currently for whatever reason feel the need to fit more and more into each day. How often have you sat and thought “I should be doing something with my free time”? The question is why do we feel that? What is wrong with having time doing nothing, or something we really enjoy. Perhaps this is a product of modern society. Imagine 200 years ago, winter, it turns dark and you have no electric lights. You sit by a fire, or in the dark, and talk to your sibling. You don’t read or exercise or accomplish anything in particular. You just do what you can (basically nothing) and enjoy the time in the dark.

Switch to the current day. Given technology we should be able to accomplish something every minute of every day. And if we don’t we wonder what we could be doing. Change is constant, and we constantly adapt, constantly reanalyze where we are at and what we are doing. When we are idle we need to fill in the time with something “productive”. We continually challenge ourselves, and question if we are doing all we can.

This creates a feeling of frustration. And if we believe “what we resist persists” the feeling never goes away, for we constantly create reasons for this. We resist the fact that we may feel best doing nothing. We are to busy, we have too much to do, there aren’t enough hours in a day, and we should be doing something. How about just saying “it’s okay to do nothing”? Don’t resist the fact that we enjoy relaxing, even though there is daylight left.

Once we accept this, the feeling of frustration won’t persist. Skip one day of exercise, don’t read if you don’t feel like it, don’t fill all your hours with activities just because you can. Accept the fact that all hours do not need to be filled.
And enjoy and be refreshed.