Last week I heard a story on the news that golf is dying, at least in part because younger people have very busy lives and they are too impatient for results. They don’t want to spend four hours relaxing in nature to see who won. They’re in so much of a hurry to get to the destination that they completely ignore the value of the journey.
That is a sad reality, and that world was built and encouraged by my generation and the ones that preceded mine. I’m sorry about that. They/we were just trying to sell more stuff so we could get more stuff. Without realizing it, we never noticed how few of us were focused on the enjoyment of life. It was just a big race to collect what we were told to go get. I’m hoping that the resulting emotional exhaustion is the straw that breaks this camel’s back.
All this being the case, has it ever occurred to you that apparently useless activities could have value? It’s true. A friend of mine is a brilliant guy who’s ran several different kinds of businesses. He has a glider-flying game for his computer. Why? Because there’s no point. Because there’s no way to win. There’s no objective. You just go wherever you want to go. That’s a form of meditation.
People used to sit around and stare at the fire. They still do, if we give them the chance. But why? It’s because it doesn’t interrupt the quiet inside. It keeps us focused, but it’s not demanding. We make our choices without tension because there is no price attached to the decision, unlike the rest of our lives. That’s how ‘nothing’ can become meaningful.
As an expression of the theory above, have you heard of the painter Jackson Pollock? He used the tensile strength of paint to help him create. There was a fluid unpredictability to his motions and it adds a quality to his works that I would call kinetic and graceful. This tool is also pretty useless at anything other than relaxing your mind by giving you something to do that you can’t fail at:
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And finally here’s one that’s a little more direct. Turn on your sound, crank up your volume, and have some fun. Anyone can do it and it’s as fun as it is meaningless. And meaninglessness has real value in anyone’s life. Start investing more in it today:
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Make your enjoyment of life a bigger priority. Stop trying to get things done and start being present more often. Because you never have been a Human Doing. You always have been and always were intended to be, a Human Being. So, Be. 😉
peace. s
I help people achieve better mental health by teaching them about reality.
