Last week I heard a story on the news that golf is dying because young people are too impatient for results and 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’s sad, and that world was built and encouraged by my generation. I’m sorry about that. We were only trying to sell you more stuff so we could get more stuff. It’s not like many of us were very focused on the enjoyment of life. It was just a big race to collect what we were told to go get and we just kept adding to what everyone needed to collect. I’m hoping that the resulting emotional exhaustion is the straw that breaks this camel’s back.
Did it every occur 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 you give them the chance. But why? Because it doesn’t interrupt the quiet inside. It keeps you focused but it’s not demanding. You make your choices without tension because there is no price attached to the decision, unlike the rest of your life. That’s why it’s meaningful.
Here’s a meaningless little tool that you can have a lot of fun with. Play around with your choices. You have more of them that you immediately may realize:
.
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:
.
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:
.
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. Now go Be. đŸ˜‰
peace. s
Following a serious childhood brain injury Scott McPherson unwittingly spent his entire life meditating on the concepts of thought, consciousness, reality and the self. This made him as strange to others as they were to him. Seeing the self-harm people created with their own overthinking, Scott dedicated part of his life to helping others live with greater awareness. He is currently a writer, speaker and mindfulness instructor based in Edmonton, AB, where he finds it strange to write about himself in the third person.
