The Nothing Space

 I am convinced that when it comes to a creative life, there is an essential skill in being able to "do nothing". When I say "do nothing", I don't mean just letting things hang out, the way a person might do at the family dinner gathering, but more like a kind of quiet potency. If you've ever seen a cat staring out a window, you might start to notice the sense of quietly waiting for conditions to ripen. The cat is very alert, but at the same time very relaxed. Normally, these two things (alertness and relaxation) don't appear in the same sentence, since one tends to associate alertness with a kind of restlessness.
    This skill is hard to really perfect, I think, because we are used to having something to do, and even when we do nothing, the emphasis is on the "nothing" part as though that were a "thing" or an object that we cling to. If I am lying in bed on a Sunday morning, I might appear to be doing nothing at all, but in my heart I am holding onto the sense of comfort in being in a warm bed: I am attached to something, and that feeling of pleasure defines my being in bed in that moment. But if I am truly "doing nothing", the emphasis is more on the doing--that is, the quiet attentiveness and the potency of being. When I am in that mode, I am capable of receiving the world with an open heart, and responding to the world with an easy mind that is not chained to any particular sense or agenda. And in this receptiveness, there is the opportunity to put together new perspectives or at least discover them with a new set of paradigms or frameworks.
   This morning and yesterday, I didn't feel very well. What happened was that as soon as I got home in the evening from the library, I had this thought of wanting to work on my proposal drafts in some depth. The problem is, as I reasoned later, these books I have lying on the floor and in front of me don't have the same feeling that they did when I borrowed them some few months back. And even though they are renewable (still), I somehow need to clear them away before I can find a new place to start in the subjects of my interest. Earlier today, this is just what I did. However, I kept one of the books because it started to feel mysteriously interesting on the subway ride, and I ended up signing out 3 new books related somewhat to my proposal. Sometimes, it's just like this, and the process of taking back old books and signing out new (and rediscovering the "old") is part of the randomness of creative processes. All one can do sometimes is to ride this randomness and be open to surprises. This is truly a "nothing space" where many things can be discovered.