never doing nothing

Is "doing nothing" a good use of your time?  

This is a really rough draft- I don't really know what the structure should be...

Some people think doing nothing is a good use of time. Take all of those people that meditate, for instance. Maybe they think they’re doing something, but I’ve tried it before and that’s what it feels like. I’ve never come close to a deeper mindful connection the world. The most exciting thing that’s happened to me meditating before is my foot fell asleep. My mom is really into meditation and really wants me to be into meditation but I just can’t do it. Maybe I’m doing it wrong, but doing nothing just makes me feel more anxious. Doing nothing just isn’t something I enjoy.

Actually, I hate doing nothing. I also find it pretty much impossible to do nothing. My short attention span combined with my inability to sit for more than four minutes worsens this problem. I can’t ever do nothing for more than four seconds. I’m a very hands-on person, sitting back and watching things happen is not my strong suit. Doing nothing makes me feel like nothing. It either makes me feel bad about all of the things I’m not doing, or feel bad about my inability not do anything. Sometimes I feel like I’m missing some spiritual understanding of the universe by not being capable of simply taking a break to take it all in, but I guess I’ll have to find it somewhere else.

The closest thing to doing nothing that I am actually capable of doing is sleeping. I don’t really like sleeping. In fact I feel like it’s a total waste of time. I often procrastinate sleeping in the same way I’m sure many people procrastinate doing things like chores. I mean, if you think about it, that’s 4 to 8 more hours each day you could potentially get back to do stuff. I could get a part time job and maybe pay for college if I stopped sleeping. I could learn how to play violin, become comfortably fluent in Portuguese, or write a book with that time. The possibilities are endless. (Well actually they aren’t endless because the majority of the population sleeps at least some each day, but there are still plenty of things I could do from my room.) How am I possibly supposed to sleep when I have all the things I could be doing to think about? Unfortunately giving up sleep for a new hobby or making a living would not be healthy.

As much as I wish I didn’t, I really need sleep. Sleep is healthy. Breaks in general are healthy. Since breaks kind of are doing nothing, then I guess doing nothing is healthy once in a while. Healthy things are always a good use of time. Like exercising, for example. A lot of people feel like exercising is a waste of their time; especially when they’re exercising and they don’t want to be. But exercising is still healthy. Just maybe not constantly. Eating is healthy to do sometimes but not constantly. Just like breaks, and just like doing nothing.

Maybe I should change my thoughts about doing nothing. All those people that meditate seem pretty at peace, and people have been doing it centuries so it must be worth it. ADD makes doing nothing more of a challenge, but maybe I have something to learn from it. Even if I don’t learn anything, it would still be good for the health of it. Everyone knows I could always use a couple extra hours of sleep, even if I won’t admit it’s a good use of my time.

why my parents don't have a blog about me

Would you mind if your family blogged about you? (I'm 20 ish words over)

I would mind if my parents blogged about me. Not because it’s an invasion of my privacy, which it is by the way, but honestly I don’t think my parents could blog about me. They spend too much time in their own worlds to know enough about mine. My mom is working from 5:00 a.m. to 8:00 p.m. most days. And as you can imagine, by the end of it all, she’s practically dead. Occasionally she’ll forward me an email about school, but she doesn’t even see that it was already sent to me. My dad is always running around, too. He fills his days somehow, and has never been one to ask to help me with things going on in my life. He asks me in the evenings how school was, but never questions the fact that I reply every day with a simple ”good.”

My melodramatic middle school sister takes up a lot of the energy my parents do have left at the end of the day. She’s outgoing, high energy, and noisy- making her a vacuum for attention since she could cry. It’s not uncommon for the four of us to spend all of dinner talking about something that happened in her world. Nor is it uncommon for her to get in loud fights with my dad. If they wrote a blog about her it would certainly be an exciting read.

My parents’ blog about me would be based on when they see me when they drive me to school in the morning, and for dinner maybe 2 nights during the school week. I feel like they don’t really get to know me during that time, so I don’t know how they could make a blog about me. Part of it is my own doing. There’s so much I feel like they could never understand, so I decide not to tell them. And the older I get the more our personalities clash, so I try to stay farther and farther away.

I’m not home a lot anymore because I’m always off doing other things. I promise I’m not a little sneak of a child- I try to tell my parents where I will be whenever I can. But even though I tell them where I am, they don’t know what I do. For example, I spend almost 12 hours a week with my robotics team. Obviously my parents know I’m on the team, but they don’t know what it is I do there or what the team does. I also sleep over at my friend’s house every other week, and if I don’t I still spend a lot of time with her. But if I lined all of my friends up they wouldn’t be able to pick her out. They still ask about people I haven’t hung out with in two years, but can’t remember the name of the friend who’s house I spend every weekend at. The only blog worthy parts of my life they don’t really know about.

They don’t know my grades in school, they don’t know who my teachers are. They only seem to have time and energy to care about what time I go to sleep each time and what I eat. Their blog would be a fascinating recap of “Tori went to bed at 12:30 again tonight even though we tell her to go to bed at 10” interspersed with “Tori says she will eat lunch at Rachel’s house. I wonder how she if ever eats when we aren’t watching her.” All of the other information in this fantasy blog would be stale and outdated, from back when they could care about what was happening in my life. I would actually be curious to read a blog they wrote about my life. It would be interesting to see what they think is going on based on the bits of information they get. But I’ll never know because they live too much in their worlds to write one.