A Post About Nothing

     If you were Christian kid that grew up in the 1990s/early 2000s, odds are you're familiar with VeggieTales, an animated series where fruits and vegetables teach kids stories and values from the Bible (albeit in a more fun, children's themed way). One of the highlights of any VeggieTales video was the "Silly Songs with Larry" segment, the part of the show where Larry comes out and sings a silly song. My favorite "Silly Song" just might be "The Pirates Who Don't Do Anything", a song where Larry, Pa Grape, and Mr. Lunt are dressed up as pirates and sing about how they've never been to Boston in the fall -- and how they don't do anything. For those who haven't seen VeggieTales, I promise it makes more sense than talking fruits and vegetables dressing up as pirates and singing about doing nothing.

     When the word "nothing" is used, it normally comes with a negative connotation. Nothing means...well, nothing. No thing. Zero. Zilch. Doing nothing implies laziness or a lack of ambition. We're always supposed to be doing something, right? If we're not doing anything, we're wasting our time - or at least not making the best use of our time. When people ask me about the weekend and how it was (or if I have plans in advance), I always feel a little guilt if I say that I'm really not up to much because it makes me sound like I'm doing nothing (besides going to the grocery story and writing a blog post, of course). In one episode of the PBS Kids show Arthur, Arthur and his friends try to create a new holiday. One of Arthur's friends suggests "Nothing to Do Today Day", a holiday idea that immediately gets shot down because a holiday has to be about something, not nothing. But what if...doing nothing is actually a good thing? 

     Everywhere you look - at work, at church, at school, at social media, everyone is always talking about how busy the are. In some ways, it starts becoming a comparison game of who's the busiest, of who has the most work to do. One person's staying until 8 PM at work most nights, another has 3 tests and a group project all in the same week, and so on. It's weird how people do that - how they talk about how stressed and busy they are. Doing that is destructive - and certainly not productive or helpful. Yet, it gets done anyway. There's something addictive about chiming in with others about busyness. The same goes for complaining. But the problem with busyness is that it's not good. It's not good to constantly be busy and always doing something. When a person keeps working out and doesn't rest, they run the risk of overworking themselves and become more prone to injury. Well, the same goes for work and how we function - if we are constantly running around doing something, eventually we will overwork ourselves, get really tired, and the simplest things could push us over the top and become too much. 

     Busyness that never stops isn't good, but it is reasoned to be better than doing nothing. Being busy means a person is doing something. Doing nothing means a person isn't do anything, just like an anthropomorphic cucumber pirate and his friends. There's a problem with that thinking, though. That ignores the importance of rest and doing...well, nothing. When building up muscles, rest is a part of the process. Heck, if one doesn't think rest is important, look no further than Genesis. After God created the world, He saw that it was well and rested. Think about that: God rested. Granted, our workload seems pretty light compared to creating the world, but there still is a value in resting. Most would also agree that there is a value in taking time away from work and going on vacation. Then again, whenever I do go on a trip, the first day back always feels tough, but I digress. 

     Last weekend, I went and saw the movie Christopher Robin, where the titular character that once spent time in the Hundred Acre Woods with Winnie the Pooh is now  all grown up and has a family - only he finds himself preoccupied with work. A central theme of the movie is about the value of doing nothing. Pooh, always full of simple yet insightful one liners, quips "people say nothing is impossible, but I do nothing everyday". For Christopher Robin, the solution to his problems was nothing. It sounds counter intuitive because it seems like the exact opposite thing we should do. Doing nothing, in theory, would only set us back further - yet, sometimes, it's exactly what we need. For me, after a long week of work, sometimes all I truly want to do is nothing. As a kid, the very idea of wanting to do nothing seems like the silliest idea possible, but as an adult, it makes all the sense in the world. 

     Sometimes, we can get so caught up in the midst of busyness and taking care of work or others that we forget to take care of ourselves. This is a struggle I've run into before - not doing a great job of taking care of myself, of ignoring my needs or feeling like it's somehow bad that all I want to do is watch an episode of Spongebob Squarepants, play Scrabble, listen to music, and then crawl into bed for the night. In the context of recharging and resting, it is perfectly fine. Now, of course, here comes the caveat: just as constantly being busy is bad, constantly doing nothing is bad as well. At the end of the day, we do have to pay bills and make a living, and feel a call or purpose to do more than watching a talking sponge or putting letter tiles together. 

     There's also something pretty special that can happen with doing nothing. To quote that honey (or hunny)-loving bear once more, "doing nothing often leads to the very best kind of something". With relationships, people often say that it's when you stop looking or aren't looking that you find someone. Life also has a way of letting opportunities fall into our laps at just the right time. Opportunities that we weren't looking for or thinking of having a way of finding us, especially when we're doing nothing. There's an episode of Spongebob Squarepants where Spongebob and Patrick are stranded, but get instructed by a conch shell to do nothing...which naturally leads to an entire picnic meal falling straight out of the sky to them (and later being found by someone). On another occasion, Patrick, one who specializes in doing nothing, receives an award for doing nothing longer than anyone else. 

     Doing nothing doesn't mean that dinner will fall right of the sky for us or that we'll get an award, but it does have a way of leading us to where we need to be or something better than we could have ever imagined. If one needs more evidence about the power of nothing, one can look no further than the 1990s sitcom Seinfeld, a critically acclaimed show (to this day) that's sometimes referred to as "a show about nothing", a joke that stems from an episode where Jerry and George pitch that very concept to TV executives (side note: the "show about nothing" premise is something that Jerry Seinfeld, as well as fans of the show, have disagreed with). 

     Even if doing nothing doesn't immediately lead to something, it still provides us the opportunity to rest and truly unplug from the busyness of life. Constantly living in a state of busyness isn't healthy and quite frankly isn't sustainable. Don't forget to carve some time out of life to do nothing, to just stay home and lie around, or to partake in simple, enjoyable activities. It just might lead to something special.