As we go about our daily business we all feel stress to some degree. Pressures come from our bosses, family, or that dick in an Ford F-150 that tries to rape our cars with their truck by tailgating. More today than ever we have a habit of overextending ourselves to the point were we need several clones to take up the slack. We feel like failures because there is so much we haven’t gotten around to. Yet, we don’t realize, at least we don’t let ourselves realize, that the real failure is not in our ability to perform, but our inability to just relax and chill. Think about it. You’ve been raised to believe that you must be a human*doing* rather than a human*being*. When we were kids many of us had been over-enrolled in extracurricular activities. We learn real early that we have to be doing… always doing. We organize our lives around activities rather than strike that balance between necessity and fun. This is what it means to be an adult.

Therefore, when we grow up it’s ingrained in us that fun or non-activity is bad. We over-enroll ourselves with projects. Every minute of the day must go toward something useful. Even when we relax it is by doing something. Either we forgot or just never learned that doing absolutely nothing is required sometimes. Doing nothing allows us to self-reflect, to let our minds wander and let our imagination do what its good at. Nothing is a form of reboot for our sanity and when we aren’t allowed to reboot, the stress of all those things with which we feel we have to fill our time, eats away at us until our anxiety goes into overload or we get diagnosed with depression.

The message is simple. Relax. Do nothing every so often. Every now and then just be… and not just on vacation. Just be a little bit every day. Maybe, just be the kid you may have never had the chance to be.

Peace