Book Review: The Art of Doing Nothing: Simple Ways to Make Time for Yourself

It should not have taken me this long to review this book. Or even read this book, for God’s sake. But as Yoda would say, A long time it did indeed take me. Clocking in at ninety-one pages, a speed reader could easily breeze through this little book in half an hour, while someone with a more leisurely bent might need an hour or perhaps two, but certainly not two weeks, as it did me.

Veronique Vienne knows how to take a mundane experience such as, say, bathing and craft an entire chapter on it. As one would linger over a tub of bubbles and aromatic bath gels, so she meanders through the pages, stopping here and there to focus on a particularly sensuous moment of an otherwise prosaic activity, maybe zeroing in on the way the water beads on one’s skin or perhaps the sound of the faucet as it drips onto the otherwise placid, thin surface. In The Art of Doing Nothing: Simple Ways to Make Time for Yourself, Vienne invites the reader into a quiet meditation on everything from aromatherapy to — of all things — yawning. (Sigh. I’m yawning just writing that word.)

Is it any wonder it took me two weeks to read the book? I would read a page or two, drop the book open on my lap, close my eyes, and drift into a waking reverie. I’d think about sunny afternoons when I was a kid, hanging out with my cousins on the beach near my grandfather’s house on the island of Mindoro, in the Philippines. I’d remember so vividly what it was like to lay still on the wide verandah that wrapped around his front porch, especially around two in the afternoon when the entire village would be tucked inside the cool darkness of their homes, sleeping away the heat and brilliant light of the day.

See? I’m doing it again.

I’ll admit that on occasion Vienne’s habit of stretching a metaphor can be tiring, and I was more than a little annoyed when she wrote thus in the chapter on the art of lounging:

Some of the best thinking we do happens when the conscious mind is on a sabbatical.
Isaac Newton figured out the law of universal gravitation when sitting under a tree.
Ben Franklin invented the lightning rod while flying a kite.
Thomas Edison came up with the lightbulb filament while idly rolling kerosene residue between his fingers.
Albert Einstein pondered the riddle of the universe with a cat on his lap.

I’ve no doubt that these extraordinary gentlemen had their moments of leisure, but Ms. Vienne is mistaken if she thinks that these particular examples illustrate the mind at rest coming up with that so-called Eureka! moment. For one thing, Franklin didn’t fly kites as a hobby or because he had nothing better to do but because he was conducting experiments specifically dealing with electricity and had decided that flying a kite during a lightning storm would be the best way to determine if lightning did indeed produce electric charges. (In fact, numerous studies suggest that Franklin never actually performed such a potentially dangerous experiment.)

Likewise, Newton wasn’t on holiday — mentally or otherwise — when he came up with his ideas regarding gravitational force while observing an apple fall from a tree. In his own writings and those of others who had discussed the subject with him, the anecdote always describes him as being in a contemplative mood, thinking deeply about the subject rather than simply idly standing around aimlessly.

Elsewhere in the book, she also stumbles a bit when she discusses meditation:

The meditation exercises championed by all spiritual teachers, from traditional masters to self-styled gurus, are never the cure-alls they promise to b. They are too exacting for an average person with a minor-league attention span. In all likelihood, only a handful of disciples can really practice what their teachers preach.

If you knew anything about meditation, however, you would understand that it’s meant precisely for those with minor-league — or even Little League or PeeWee League — attention spans. That’s the whole point of the practice of meditation, after all, to teach one to focus. That’s why it’s called practice, not perfection. Some people take to it like the proverbial ducks to water, but the vast, vast majority of us might spend our entire lives reaching the point where we can spend more than fifteen seconds focusing on, well, nothing. Meditation will always be a work in progress. The benefits come from actually doing it, not from achieving anything in particular. The practice is the end, not the means.

Vienne does an excellent job of pointing out the simple beauty of life itself and how much we miss by rushing about, always living for the future rather than enjoying the present, but some of her examples indicate a rather lazy approach to research. As a journalist myself, I see in her the very common tendency for many of my colleagues to succumb to that sin of knowing just a little about everything but very little about any one thing. Still, maybe she’s simply being her own best test case. After all, this is a book about doing nothing.

Most of the time, however, she shines in her languid approach to life, her thoughts on napping (which I definitely need to do more of), yawning (there I go again), listening, tasting, and waiting. I especially loved that last chapter on waiting and her musings on the nature of time. Time has always been a subject of utter fascination for me, both the scientific and the philosophical definition of it. I never seem to have enough, and yet at certain times (say, when I’m waiting for an editor to approve my proposal or for my plane to finally start boarding after an interminable overnight layover in a place like Bombay International Airport) time’s elasticity plays tricks on me. It stretches into the infinite, and then everything grinds to a halt: the people sitting near me, the clock ticking overhead, the TV around the corner. In that space out of time (or time out of space?) — and airports are especially notorious for this — life really does exist in a void.

So go forth and read this book, but please remember: Do not operate heavy machinery or moving vehicles while reading this book, as it may cause severe drowsiness. You have been forewarned.

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