on the virtue of doing nothing

I have a new respect for people who don't do anything with their lives. At least they're not making things worse.

I can't say that for myself, of course. I'm a very industrious person and I'm seldom sitting still, so more likely than not I'm engaged in making something much worse than it already was. Not deliberately, of course. Anything I make worse I do with the best of intentions. Frequently I'm happily imagining all the praise I'll receive for my cleverness. But that doesn't change the fact that whatever it was, it is now worse.

I was thinking about this this morning, as I was watching my daughter idly playing with a lovely carved candle I was given a few years back. She was carving large chunks of the wax out of it with her thumbnail as she chatted to me, and the chunks were dropping all around her on the floor. It took a moment for this meaningless vision to cohere into something that made sense to me. It was just so randomly destructive. And then of course I shouted "Hey!," took it away from her, and began pondering the supreme uselessness of everything it is I do.

As everyone who has one knows, this is just life with kids, who start the world as minions of the forces of chaos, here to take apart whatever harmonic patterns we establish. They can't help it. My daughter didn't mean to be destructively ruining one the few nice objects I have around the house and scattering its debris all over the carpet. But that didn't prevent her from doing so during her one of few leisurely moments before school.

And so it goes. We nag our children to stop watching TV and to do their homework. We tell them TV is bad for them, and we worry that they are eroding their brains and thus falling behind in the all-important race to get into a really good college so that we can brag to our friends about it. But perhaps we should be praising our couch potatoes instead. After all, the house is still tidy and their clothes are still clean. If we could get them to do nothing all the time, we'd never have to throw out brand-new tee shirts, vacuum our sofas instead of our floors, or buy expensive replacement items like dishes or toaster ovens.

Think of the ramifications! If we trained our children now to do nothing but mind their own business and not make things worse, we might one day have, say, a clean and healthy environment. A functioning legislature. The divorce rate would go down! Our pets would live longer!

The possibilities are staggering--too staggering for my necrotic brain to deal with right now. So I think I'll stop thinking and instead go help out the world by lying down for a midmorning nap.