Sweet nothing.

How long is it possible to enjoy doing nothing? Absolutely nothing. A few days? A few hours? A few minutes? In a world so meticulously designed to be constantly doing something, what does doing nothing mean?

When I live life, I try to do things, at all times. Everyone around me is always doing things too. Its a perpetual flux. We must never be idle. It’s a sin. An unforgivable sin.

One can ask — what is it us humans really seek out of this constant cycle of emotion depraved productivity? Some kind of self-realization? Emancipation? Happiness? I want you to know that I am not talking about the desire to become good at something here. What I’m interested in is the hyper-productive culture of attaining a kind of elevated state of mind, to get somewhere in life although most humans will agree happiness is fairly simple to achieve and highly ephemeral.

What about nothingness scares us then?

There seems to be a haunting delusion amongst our species, a giant self-importance, a cunning quality to go against the universe itself, to achieve many goals, to forget everything happiness encapsulates, to deliberately ignore the calm and serene side of life.

I found myself in India last year in October for 22 days. I had nothing to do, no plans, no itineraries, no goals. I was there then with a kind of depraved soul, wanting to experience nothingness, to know what it was like to wake up and do nothing and to be at peace with it. I wanted to pass beyond myself but struggled with it immensely. I was desperate to experience a personal salvation in the crevices of life that was somehow happening to me in the streets of my country. I was craving a void – to forget the past, to experience life with the unknowingness of a desire for the future.

Here’s the thing about wanting nothing — it turns into wanting everything. The universe then puts you in touch with a mystery as deep as sea. The littlest thing becomes the greatest thing. Your desire for nothing turns into the most acute awareness of an unsolvable mystery that life is.

That’s the sweet spot.

The spot where you have no beginnings, no ending, just the mystery of the universe. The destination you have arrived at is now a point of departure for another destination. Nothingness lasts a few seconds. Its not that one can not not do something. But we are neurotic beings constantly fighting our own thoughts, constantly trying to get somewhere.

I did taste the sweet nothing during that trip to India. Nothing had been added to or subtracted from my life. I still stood in the midst of the vast ocean of life. But I did know something after that experience. The best medicine for my soul was to do nothing. Decay, growth, beauty, ugliness, darkness, light, chaos, order, purposefulness, purposelessness, melancholy, joyousness, truth, lies — everything makes up the world. I learnt that most of the accidents are unavoidable and life is a sea of mystery.

I had tasted how sweet the sweet nothing is after all. A bit too sweet perhaps.