Today Dishing: Doing Nothing

Today marks the official beginning of summer. I love summer.

Do you remember summer days when you were a kid? The days were long and hot and presented endless opportunities. If you had a bike, a friend or two and some loose change, you had the makings of a great day.

Compared to today those days seemed longer. Now time and days fly by. A friend explained his theory that indeed the days are obviously the same in terms of hours but when you are say, 11 years old, one day is only one in 4,015 days you’d been alive. Each day seemed longer because is was a larger percentage of your entire life. Now a day for me, is roughly one in 22,620, making each day seem less when compared to the whole. Thus the more days you live the faster time passes.  Not a scientific study, but the theory makes sense to me.

A feature in today’s CHICAGO TRIBUNE advocates for taking time to “do nothing”. The article brought me back to my childhood when lying on the ground deciphering who or what different cloud formations looked like took an entire afternoon. I never thought of it as “doing nothing”. Remember we didn’t have computers or video games. We only had our imaginations.

Which is the point of the article. “Doing nothing” allows for discovery and appreciation of what is in front or around us. It’s another take on stopping to small the roses.

These days “doing nothing” sounds so derelict, so lazy, so unimportant.

Yesterday I began compiling my summer reading list. Reading definitely qualifies as something. In addition to the reading list “doing nothing” is my new summer goal.

If all works out, the summer reading list will be completed but the “doing nothing” may linger into the Fall.

I’ll let you know how it goes.