It isn’t nothing
Have you noticed that we often answer ‘nothing’ (inaccurately) to questions about what we are doing?
“What are you doing?”
“Nothing”
Unlikely.
“What are you doing this weekend”
“Nothing”
Very unlikely.
More likely you’ll be at home, tidying up, putting the laundry on, cooking, cleaning up, taking the dog for a walk, playing lego with your kids. If you get out of your pyjamas you might buy groceries or get the car fixed or buy a plant pot or some other task that doesn’t feel ‘enough’ to mention.
These are not ‘nothings’. They are things we don’t think worthy of mentioning. Everyday things. But they are things we can at least quantify.
There is a different kind of ‘nothing’ that is harder to name.
In What Mothers Do (especially when it looks like nothing), Naomi Stadlen explains that we don’t have language for the profound and exhausting labour of parenting. What we are doing – soothing a crying baby, patiently repeating their new sounds, holding them with love – these things can’t be measured. When a new parent says they ‘have done nothing all day’ they mean they didn’t do tasks they could cross off a list. From the baby’s perspective, being held, heard, soothed and cared for certainly was not nothing.
But it's not just parents. We all need to think again about ‘doing nothing’.
At our last Powerful Pause session, one (extremely professional and effective) person said she was committing to some moments of ‘doing nothing’ and she was emphatic that she meant nothing,
not thinking time
not reading journals or articles
not quiet time to stimulate creativity
not time for wellbeing
She meant time to stop. To be “off”.
We don’t have language for this essential and wise choice do we? What would we call it?
Recovery time?
Time to be?
Self-care?
Sounds a bit woolley doesn’t it? Last month I ran a session for women at the universities of Oxford and Cambridge. At the end one women asked:
“How do I know if taking time to be self-compassionate is not just avoiding being efficient?”
You can probably guess my response. I'm a fan of resilience, not efficiency. Efficiency is just-in-time supply chains, productivity software and lists. Resilience is our capacity to respond when things go wrong. Doing ‘nothing’ deepens our capacity to respond.
Not having back-to back meetings means we have time to respond
Having space in the day to breathe means we are calmer to respond
Giving our minds time to freewheel means we are more creative in our response.
Maybe we should put it in our calendars as ‘strategic resilience’ or ‘capacity building’. That sounds rather robust and acceptable. Then, as the buddhist saying goes, we, “don’t just do something, sit there”.
Making this shift in gears is very hard. It means changing the habits of a lifetime. If you’d like the support of a warm and positive group, then we’d love to have you join the next Powerful Pause group coaching programme. It begins on 19 September 2022 and all the details, dates and testimonials are here.
