How To Do Nothing
Modern life's most uncomfortable activity
There’s an Italian phrase I’ve been thinking about recently: il dolce far niente.
It roughly translates to “the sweetness of nothing.”
When I visited my family in Italy in 2023, the thing that stood out to me the most, besides the unfathomably intricate details that adorned the famous architecture, was how many people stood outside their homes and apartments doing nothing.
Friends would share cigarettes, watching tourists pass by. Others would fold their arms over their chest, drinking in the sounds of the Fiats, scooters and chatter.
There was an air of coolness to them. A different type than I’m used to. While New Yorkers are cool for what they do and how fast they go, I got the sense that a lot of Italians are cool for what they don’t do. This coolness oozed unconcern. If you listened close enough, you might mistake their breaths for the wind.
Part of this is romanticization, I know. But even I—a fairly anxious, ambitious New Yorker—was influenced to slow down.
You don’t realize how much you’re missing until you do nothing. It was easy to be awestruck by what the Romans built thousands of years ago; you can’t overlook them. What isn’t easy to catch is the deeper motivations that led to such architecture being built in the first place.
Why is the modern Western world so ugly? No man-made structures I come into contact with have come close to what I felt walking around the walls of the Colosseum. Was it just novelty disguised as something genuinely better? Or was there a certain soul I could sense within the concrete itself?
When I do nothing, I’m more inclined to believe the latter. I feel like I’m tapping into whatever long nothings ancient Romans had access to—those endless, dark nights lit only by candles and stars and moonlight—and reconnecting with something that inspires me to observe the world deeply and make a lasting impact on it.
It is extremely difficult to understand why anyone would feel compelled to do anything other than activities tied to utility, productivity, or monetary gain in a culture that suffocates the silent moments from everything. When every creative thought leaves your mind as soon as it enters—when you don’t have the tool of nothing to capture that thought in the brief period of time it reveals itself—you start to convince yourself that human life is one pointless, mundane, monotonous routine.
But when I do nothing, almost everything feels remarkable. I start to question how everything on Earth could be moving, all at once, undulating—towards what, I’m not sure—sensing that there’s some imperceptible, synchronized effort in what’s going on here. And when I remind myself of the absurdity of it all, I can feel my own breath getting caught in the wind.
So, how do you do it? How do you do nothing? The question contradicts itself. Instead of doing nothing, just notice. Notice the texture of your carpet. Notice the subtle murmur outside. Notice the smell of the streets after the rain stops. Notice the way the light glints as it passes through the small openings between leaves in the trees.
Everything starts as nothing. And it is only by doing nothing that you can do anything at all.
Book Chronicles #64
Welcome back to updates on my upcoming novel, Echoes Across Infinity: a story about a 21 year old navigating life in a post-pandemic world who develops the ability to shift into a parallel reality.
Wow, I did not realize how much work my prose needed. I’m sure every writer says that with every editing pass they go through, but… I’m just so glad I’m doing this final edit.
There were a lot of unnecessary ways I explained characters’ actions. Very rookie mistakes. For example, I started a sentence with “I watched as she screamed…”
Not good. The book is written in first person. If my character is seeing something, you already know they’re watching it. Instead, I trimmed it down to “She screamed…”
Little stuff like that is what really elevates the reading experience. I’m about halfway through the final round of edits now. One to one and a half-ish more weeks and I’ll have the final manuscript.
See you next week.
Quote of The Week
“Sitting quietly, doing nothing, spring comes, and the grass grows by itself."
—Matsuo Bashō