Pandemic times and art of doing nothing
Two years of the Covid-19 pandemic have wreaked havoc on the human tribe. It has almost upended day-to-day lives across the globe. But this trying period also brought some blessings. One of them is the evolution of the singular art of doing nothing.
The interminable lockdowns and long periods of social distancing forced people to spend time with themselves having, more or less, nothing to do and, thus, this consummate art flowered. I rang up a retired friend during the initial period of lockdowns to ask what he had been doing throughout the day. His reply was, “What I have enjoyed doing throughout my life – nothing!” Another’s reply was slightly more specific, “Two to three hours are spent solving Sudoku and Crossword or playing Bridge on the internet. Then doing nothing throughout the day becomes so tiring that I have to rest afterwards.”
I think it is sheer imbecility to equate doing nothing with worthlessness. Definitely a higher form of consciousness is needed to be able to sit idle and stare into the vacuum. And the wife of a writer can never realise that her spouse standing at the window and staring at the distant horizon for hours together is not as ‘nikamma (useless)’ as she thinks. It’s just possible that an Iliad or Odyssey or Meghaduta is taking shape in his mind.
Even outside the lockdown periods, we should not feel guilty about spending time doing nothing. It needs developed minds to appreciate the significance of ‘creative idleness’ which John Keats has eulogized in his poem, Ode on Indolence. Here the poet, drowned in ‘honeyed indolence’ sees with his half-wakeful eyes the tempting figures of Love, Ambition and Poesy slowly moving away. He let them pass by as none of them is worth bringing him out of his lethargic trance. And we see our own Gulzar Sahib searching for the same heaven of idleness in his lines, “Dil dhoondata hai fir vahi fursat ke raat din.” My heart craves for the long golden afternoons spent lying flat on my back – doing nothing.
How creatively we utilise our leisure is the real measure of the stage that our civilisation has reached. A busy person can seldom be an inventor or creator of great literature. Isaac Newton must be daydreaming leisurely in the garden when an apple fell on his head and the world was rewarded with the phenomenal concept of gravitation. And the good old Archimedes discovered the principle of buoyancy, not while toiling in some laboratory, but when he was bathing relaxedly in a tub. The Eureka moments or flashes of insight are the most likely to strike the great minds when they are deeply enjoying the idle moments – doing absolutely nothing. Most of the classics have been written in prisons during the period of confinement of their writers when they had nothing to do but meditate and write.
In this context, an interesting ad campaign by Cadbury aptly delineates the significance of this phenomenon. An old lady is seen sitting on a chair just below a cantilevered balcony when her stick falls on the road. A youngster is standing by the side of the road, eating chocolate. She requests him to pick up the stick for her. The young man nods but does nothing. The old woman is forced to leave her chair, come to the road and pick up the stick. At the same moment, the balcony crashes and falls on the chair just vacated. The old woman casts a grateful glance towards the chocolatemunching young man and says, “Thank you son, thank you for doing nothing!”
THE EUREKA MOMENTS OR FLASHES OF INSIGHT ARE MOST LIKELY TO STRIKE THE GREAT MINDS WHEN THEY ARE DEEPLY ENJOYING THE IDLE MOMENTS – DOING ABSOLUTELY NOTHING