The Value of Nothing
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 the value of nothing. We would all benefit from
learning the 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 the doing nothing of watching TV some part of you is
still engaged) and the 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 the computers resources. On many older
machines, all of this activity would eventually overwhelm the
computer