My Hero: Mr. Zero

At times, I have nothing to say.

That is not necessarily a bad thing, just is. Doing nothing rarely gets the respect it deserves. After all, nothing is the sacred state coveted by Zen practitioners, secluded monks, and other pursuers of enlightenment, so there must be something to it. “Nothing” was the holy grail of the Seinfeld TV show, the concept that launched the mega-millionaires into a life where they could do… nothing, if they wished. Do you ever hear overworked cubicle-mates say with a smile, when asked about what they’re doing on their three-day weekends, “nothing.”

Yes, “nothing” is the new trophy wife of the overworked, the hidden objective on all our secret lists, and the easiest-so-say, but a hard-to-do goal. I once heard a group of middle-schoolers describe what they would do if they had all the money they could ever want. One particularly thoughtful girl, after a long pause, replied, “Nothing… cause my Daddy says to do that is the most expensive thing in the world.”

In our fast-paced world where most of us struggle to get everything done in a day, the opposite of being busier than a one-armed wallpaper hanger is to do nothing, or be un-busy. Sometimes the cure is an abrupt reversal of the causal agent. The shock of this move, if nothing else, will make one assess what’s really important in life. And I can think of nothing more cathartic than to stop and smell the flowers, so to speak. So the next time you head off for a weekend of medicinal reversalness, and your co-workers ask you what you’re up to this weekend, you can wryly smile and say, “Nothing”… and that’s something.