It all began with a riddle: "What is greater than God, more evil than Satan, rich people want it, poor people have it, and if you eat it you will die."This riddle stumped us for days. Like with all riddles, its answer revealed a basic component of life we often take for granted. The answer was "Nothing".
In this harried life, we are all in a frenzy to have more, do more, say more, be more. We don't take time to stop and appreciate
value of nothing. We would all benefit from learning value of doing nothing, saying nothing, and feeling nothing.
The Value of Doing Nothing. To say that we are all very busy is a gross understatement. People work hard to squeeze as much as possible into every minute of every day. Even our children are overwhelmed with school and sports and music lessons and play dates and so on and so on. It is not often that we stop and bask in a few moments of nothing. Try it: take 5 - 15 minutes one day to unload and unwind. Allow yourself to be free to think of nothing and do nothing. Recognize there is a big difference between doing nothing of watching TV some part of you is still engaged) and doing nothing of sitting in a dark quiet room alone with your thoughts. It is like working on an older computer when you have 5 - 10 applications open. You are jumping between applications, sharing data, saving information, using more and more of computers resources. On many older machines, all of this activity would eventually overwhelm computer’s memory, applications would start to lock up and you would be forced to reboot. That's what spending time doing nothing is about, forcing yourself to periodically reboot.
The Value of Saying Nothing. Words are mighty things. Unfortunately many of us are totally unaware of impact our words can have on other individuals. We are too wrapped up in being right, being heard, or getting in last word. When was last time you let your spouse, friend or co-worker talk? I mean really talk where you were not right there with an immediate reply or a comeback. When was last time you felt a heated discussion brewing and you decided to hold your tongue versus fan flames? Often best thing we can say to another person is nothing.
