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About 5 years ago I became deadline phobic. Time began to feel like a highly caffeinated prison guard gripping a taser gun with very twitchy fingers. The idea of needing to be anywhere or anything by a certain time became suddenly both intolerable and more important than anything had ever been. I attributed this as a response to turning 40, but on closer inspection, I’d had an obsession with time scarcity for a very long time. The irony.
For a number of years now I’ve been celebrating my increased capacity for sitting in meditation through the inner noise and discomfort created by, well frankly by being a living human being. Then about 6 months ago something new started to show up and It. Was. Awful! Awful awful awful. Because what started coming through in every sit was nothing. Nothing bad. Nothing good. Just nothing. I had anticipated breaking free from the dark forest of tangled thorny branches and hidden monsters, into a colorful meadow with a babbling brook, birds and butterflies – my prize for the endurance I had been so egotistically applauding myself for. I was my own white knight battling through to rescue myself from the castle. Basically I was going to be rewarded with heaven having endured hell. No such luck. There are no prizes for doing the work of inner liberation because love isn’t conditional, so there are no rewards or punishments. There’s just doing it or not doing it or whatever. Noone cares.
So ‘nothing’ is my new classroom. No ideas. No inspiration. No inner nudges. No creative juice. No desire for anything (except not nothing). Nothing to look at. Nothing to listen to. Nothing to divert me. Just nothing. What fresh new hell is this??? Because I need something, anything. There’s somewhere I need to be, and by a certain time. The clock is ticking. I don’t know where it is I’m supposed to be, but it’s somewhere. Really. It’s very important. I can tell by how urgent and insistent it feels. I’m feeling a bit tired, but no time for that, tired is for losers. And even though time doesn’t exist, I’m running out of it. So nothing isn’t going to cut it. I need to feel like I’m doing something, overcoming something, achieving something, getting somewhere. What am I going to do with nothing? Actually, I lie. I’ve had a couple of things come to mind.
The first was a memory of one of my favourite activities as a child. At my family’s home, there was a lilac tree surrounded by a small patch of grass, much of which was covered in clovers. I used to sit under that tree, just staring into that patch of clovers looking for one with four leaves. I had a desire to find one, but no attachment or urgency, because I had no sense of a deadline. If I didn’t find one today, maybe I’d find one tomorrow or maybe I’d find a tadpole or maybe I’d climb something. My creativity was endless because of just this kind of behaviour. Fallow periods. I never thought for one second to question or judge the instinct to stare into grass without needing to get something out of it. I just did it. Sometimes I wanted to wander around the garden aimlessly putting stuff in buckets or poking and looking at things for no apparent reason. Purposeless, pointless activity. There was no need to justify the aimlessness, it was instinctive. My creative energy flowed naturally, free to be dormant until it was time to emerge. There’s a reason why kids don’t need to go on retreat or spa breaks: They are constantly, naturally, regenerating . . .
. . . Then we grow up as if this natural cycle of energy is the domain of children. The truth is, it is we who have set up life this way. We’ve imprisoned ourselves with self-sufficiency and isolation, deadlines, and artificially imposed time and money constraints. We have created a world of deadlines and financial commitments we believe ourselves to be victims of, when in fact the harder truth is that we’ve chosen them. We’re all running around just wishing we could get a break, some time off, or time out, when in fact, nothing is more terrifying to us. The second the space begins to open up, we fill it. We call or text someone. Turn on the TV. Get out a book. Turn to the person in the room and talk to them. Start making a plan. Pick up a hobby. Check social media, email, the news. We go on vacation for some “R&R” or a break, and the first thing we do is get sick, look for activities, pull out our holiday reading, pass out into a coma, fight with the person we came with, pick holes in the place we came to or the travel it took to get there. Worry about the money it’s costing. Numb out around the money it’s costing and push the financial insecurity into the future. Eat ourselves numb, drink ourselves numb. Divert ourselves incessantly with tourist attractions and adventures much of which we experience from behind a camera. A break is the last thing we want.
So what about those bills that need paying? Food and shelter etc. How does fallow fit into that? That’s the problem with self-sufficiency, this so-called freedom of independence and self-reliance. We don’t trust each other to take turns at the wheel. Not every field falls fallow at the same time. We were created to be interdependent, and we are, we just deny that we are so that we can feel in control.
The place of ‘nothingness’ I’ve arrived into I believe, is the emptiness described in Buddhism as the place from which all things are born. It is, in fact, the opposite of nothing because they say, it’s filled with dynamic potential. And I think that’s why I’m finding it so uncomfortable. Because how do you explain that at lunch with friends or to clients or bosses. When asked about your plans or projects or intentions or solutions, and something is required in the way of a date or something definitive, what do you say? Well yes, I’m feeling filled with dynamic potential so I can tell that something is on the way but it’s something that exists beyond space, time and form so all I can tell you is, pencil me in (very lightly) for something at some point in the future. Probably.
So actually it isn’t the nothingness or the emptiness that’s awful. In fact, it feels incredibly nourishing. I can feel the soil being tilled and regenerating. My trust is reemerging in the cycle ending at the exact date and time that it’s supposed to. My attachment to the form it will take is dissolving. Time expands in this place until it disappears altogether and all I’m left with is now. The awful part is when the voice of scarcity and conformity arises. The prison guard tasers me. Time’s up. We need an answer. What have you got to show for all this fallow crap? (Excuse the pun). Get to the garden centre and just buy a plant for god’s sake. Time shrinks again and I’m back in the race. Chasing the clock and the ultimate act of productivity to end the need for any future obligatory productivity. Adrenaline fuelled. Detached from the present, until I drop. Depleted. Exhausted. Food. TV. Bed.
The irony, of course, is that what we achieve when we surrender to lots of sitting around, staring out of windows and doing nothing, is generally of a significantly higher quality than artificially, generated on demand solutions or products. There’s a reason why things that are left to brew or grow for long periods of time are expensive. Cheese, wine, whiskey. And all they’ve been doing is sitting around. Not only that but when we free ourselves to do nothing when we need it, we feel less of a victim of having to do something when it’s time. The reason so many of us want the freedom to do nothing forever is that we don’t give ourselves permission to do it sometimes. Nothing is a phase, not a destination. If nothing has become a way of life, our creativity has become blocked. But that’s another story.
So what’s required to reclaim this blissful state of freedom from feeling compelled to always be doing something, even if it’s active checking out, or productive spiritual or health-related practice. For many of us, slowing down and doing significantly less is a start. For some, relinquishing an excessively costly life. Not something that’s measurable by anyone but the individual themselves. Only we know at what point our material needs have become a pair of handcuffs. For others, relinquishing an attachment to productivity and achievement as a source of self-esteem and false pride, or a way not to feel.
For me, all of the above, plus a deep surrender of time. Trusting in my own natural cycles of soil fertilisation. Aka, the not very ego-stroking manure phase. Feeding on and allowing myself to be nourished by the emptiness of unfilled, unproductive, low energy time. Trusting the regeneration phase to have a natural conclusion. Not because of some external requirement but because of an internal requirement to create something or act on an idea that’s taken form. And if an external requirement shows up, to ask myself, but is it really? If I don’t show up for this, am I ok with losing it, or letting it go for something that’s potentially better down the line? Could this be my core life lesson? Is God laughing at me somewhere saying, “The clue was in the title. I mean come on. Peatfield?”
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This post was originally published on NataliePeatfield.com and is republished here with the author’s permission.—
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Photo credit: Getty Images
