This Summer, Take Time To Do Absolutely Nothing

This summer, I want you to do absolutely nothing.

By this I mean, set aside at least a few days toward the pursuit of nothing. You may, if you wish, spend part of your summer doing something. Just don’t do too much of it.

I am convinced that nothing is exactly what people need to do the most. We work all year and then when summer vacation comes around we fill it up with frantic activity such as learning to hang glide or rebuilding the deck or racing the RV to Montana at speeds of up to 35 mph.

What our minds and our bodies truly crave, however, are those summer vacations of our childhoods. We need to wake up on glorious summer mornings and have the luxury of no plans beyond, possibly, unwrapping a cherry Popsicle, lying in the hammock and watching the clouds.

Watching the clouds is, technically, doing something, but in spirit and practice it is doing nothing. Doing nothing cannot be strictly defined, except to say that it generally costs no money, requires no advance reservations and has no time limits. Thus, my current obsession, golf, does not qualify. (It is actually “worse than nothing.”) The only activities that qualify are those which can be lumped under the heading of “not much; nothin’ special,” as in:

Person No. 1: What’d you do today?

Person No. 2: Not much. Nothin’ special.

Here are a few activities that almost always qualify as nothing:

* Reading. Is there a finer luxury on earth than an entire day devoted to a comfortable lawn chair, a glass of iced tea and the pleasures of J.K. Rowling, Toni Morrison, Tom Clancy or Patrick O’Brian? You can sail around the world, you can use the latest laser weaponry, you can attend wizard’s school, and at the end of the day, when somebody asks what you did, you can still honestly say, “Not much. Nothin’ special.”

* Walking. I am not talking about race-walking or mountain-walking or that kind of goofy power-walking where you look as if you are bustling importantly around in your shorts. No, I am talking about aimless walking, where you just sort of stroll out the front door and idly wander away. You are not sure where you are going, and you are in no hurry to find out.

* Watching birds. This fits into exactly the same category as watching clouds, if you do it right. It can’t be the kind of bird-watching that involves expeditions to Patagonia to see the crested booby. Instead, it should involve the backyard, a blanket and a great deal of idle pondering on subjects such as: Who has the prettiest song? The house finch or the song sparrow?

* Gardening. No, not power-gardening, or aerobic gardening, or Sunset magazine gardening, or the kind of gardening where you sculpt a fabulous “water feature” for your personal collection of pink flamingos. I am talking about the kind of gardening where you recline on grass next to a flower bed and occasionally pick out a weed while spending most of your time sniffing the irises.

* Hanging out with your dog. Dogs are experts at doing nothing, and if you vow to spend a warm afternoon hanging out with one, petting one, communing with one, you will discover that the two of you can do nothing together quite happily. (The same applies to hanging around with your kids).

* Napping. This can be done in conjunction with most of the above activities. In fact, if you suddenly wake up with a start and can’t account for the previous 45 minutes, that means you are doing the above activities correctly.

As for things that will never qualify as nothing, here’s a quick list: Installing a garbage disposal. Rebuilding a tranny. Day-trading. Giving birth.

Now, you don’t actually have to stay home to do nothing. You can do plenty of nuttin’ in Majorca or Maui or Mazatlan. However, you’ll first have to endure the modern world’s version of purgatory, “air travel,” which will require you to spend extra days doing nothing just to fully recuperate.

Or you can do nothing at your “lake cabin” (or, speaking for myself, “lake tent”). A day at a lake is almost automatically a do-nothing day.

But really, you don’t have to go anywhere at all. When you were a kid on summer vacation, you didn’t need to be in Maui. You just needed a good Popsicle and a cloud shaped like Maui. And that, ladies and gentlemen, was really something.