'il dolce far niente' - The sweetness of doing nothing

Okay, this post was in draft for a while now, and I wasn’t sure, if I wanted to publish it. Anyway, finally I did decide and here it is;

I saw the movie ‘Eat, pray, love‘ sometime last year with a girlfriend and thought it was alright. Last weekend, when we were going through our netflix list, this movie was available for online streaming and my husband wanted to watch it. So I saw parts of the movie with him again.

I first heard the Italian phrase, ‘il dolce far niente’  in that movie. It means the ‘sweetness of doing nothing’. Now, when I heard that phrase, I got thinking….How can one not be doing anything? I mean what does nothing mean? Your brain is always thinking everytime, every second, right?

I must admit (and it takes some courage to do so) – I am completely the opposite (have been until now, and trying to change that!) -from being impatient, to getting angry or emotionally upset at trivial things, to having doing something every minute – I feel I have a million thoughts even when I am doing nothing! To me doing nothing was wasting time!

I personally want to adopt that idea of ‘doing nothing’ at times in my life.  After some research on google regarding that phrase (and I admit again, it took me to google that phrase, even the English one, as I really never knew what ‘doing nothing’ means!), here’s my viewpoint on it -

We are so used to ‘doing’ things in our life, and taking everything as a task. Sometimes we don’t know if we really like doing it, or we do it simply because we have to do it. Survival. It seems like we were born to – study, work, get married, have children and then retire. That’s the cycle of life. Of existence. If we are not successful at something, in career, in family – we see ourselves as a failure. We have set high expectations, goals for ourselves. Whatever you do, every task – should have a purpose. That’s how we are trained to think.

However, the concept of ‘doing nothing’ from what I understand, is about slowing down, observing things around you, appreciating smaller things in life. Doing things that don’t have a purpose, at times. As farah writes in her blog, taking note of smaller things or things that you enjoy doing (which don’t have a purpose) could mean for example, ‘smell of the dirt after the first rain’. I would like to add,

1. sitting with my good friend and simply chatting
2. staring at the ocean
3. A walk on the beach
4. reading an inspiring book
5. sitting in the garden and having a drink
6. staring at the flowers we have planted in our garden
7. a morning walk
8. observing the sunset/sunrise

I must add I had created my ‘Funtodolist‘ not as a to do list to add value to whatever I am doing. But to make myself enjoy those things that I wanted to from a very long time. Even if I had to write it down and call it a ‘to do list’ , the point is still to do the things that I WANT TO DO, not for anyone else, but for myself!

I would like to do the above, not to add value to my career, or my personality, or for my family or anything else, but simply to JUST EXPERIENCE THE JOY OF DOING IT!

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