Nothing

What do you do when you have nothing to do?

You could meditate, of course.  Or medicate, for that matter.  Or, if you were 13 years old, something else that begins with “m” and ends with “ate.”  (“Micturate!”  Of course; that’s what you were thinking, right?)

Certainly, there’s no end of tasks you could undertake: cleaning, gardening, Bible study, re-organizing your sock drawer, learning Spanish, volunteering at the local food bank, writing letters to your Congresspersons, making potato salad, even taking the dog for a walk, and on and on.

But, naah.

As the pre-Socratic Greek philosopher, Zeno of Elea reminds us, doing something requires first doing it halfway, and before that doing it a quarter-way, and before that, an eighth, etc., etc., so since there’s an infinite number of steps to finally accomplishing anything, that means we can never do so, so why begin at all?

Or, as the contemporary philosopher Homer Simpson put it, “Trying is the first step towards failure.”  Again, may as well, therefore, do nothing.

Unfortunately, doing nothing is doing something, so once again, we find ourselves faced with the original question posed at the beginning of this piece.

I suppose you could think.  But think about what?  Might as well try thinking about nothing and get yourself all tied up in the same loop all over again.

Eating seems to be the default.  If all else fails, make yourself a sandwich, or even better, stand over the sink shoveling food into your mouth harvested from leftover containers tucked in the back of the refrigerator.

The problem is: all of these endeavors are relatively short-lived and so you soon find yourself with nothing to do once more.  And since you, yourself, are relatively long-lived (at least in comparison to over-the-sink-eating), you’ll still have many a year with nothing to do for many a year.

Oh well, there’s always writing; so you could do that and eventually end up with something like this.