The Spiritual Practice of Doing Nothing

On productivity culture, high school track coaches, and knowing our worth beyond "doing."

Hello, Readers! Thank you for subscribing to The Slow Take, my very occasional newsletter about the strange beauty of being human. True to name, I started this essay on April 29th, and have finished it a month later. It’s perhaps the slowest Slow Take so far. In it, I ask: What happens when you’ve grown tired of the engine of ambition? What’s next? (Hint: Naps!)

I hope you enjoy.

---

Lately I’ve been feeling a strong pull to do nothing. To nap. Burn the to-do lists. Gaze at the sky.

It isn’t just a casual desire. It’s a deep call, from a place I might call “the gravity of me.” Some folks call this a “divine invitation.”

It’s like I’ve grown very weary of what I call “the Engine of Ambition.”

I know this engine well. For decades, I’d used it to get my ass moving. And it’s propelled me into some beautiful things. But I’ve also seen the way it can run me into dead-ends: I’ve achieved the thing, but my soul still feels hollow, hungry.

What happens if I don’t strive for anything? What happens if I set no goals? At least, none meant to satisfy my dumb human ambition? What happens if I tuck that ambition to bed, say shushhhh, invite it to take a nap—or a long hibernation?

How would life unfold then?

A few weeks ago, I explained all this to my spiritual director. She nodded quietly. She’s a nun I talk to via Facetime, so her face appears on my laptop through the long rectangle of her phone.

I confessed to her that I felt anxiety around this desire to stop striving. I felt an unsettledness, a knee-jerk reaction that said, Oh, but you can’t do that!? How else will you get things done?

Get. Things. Done.

“What is it,” the nun asked, “that’s compelling about overdrive?” She invited me to “get underneath” this response.

I closed my eyes. I asked my resistant self what her problem was. Why didn’t she like this “do nothing” idea.

Her reply was clear: “Who will you be without your doing!? How else will you justify your existence?!”

At that point, I thought, Oh, You again! Hello, the belief that we prove our worth by our output! I know You!

***

In Rest is Resistance, Tricia Hersey attempts to dismantle the cultural expectation that we should always commoditize our time, grind stuff out, never allow ourselves rest. She attributes these toxic beliefs to ableism, white supremacy, and capitalism.

You can’t touch or smell or taste these monolithic abstractions. I wonder sometimes how they deliver their values into our bones. How does capitalism and ableism and white supremacy transmit ideas into our cells and sinew and sleep patterns?

This morning, I took a short, slow run and thought of my old high school track coach. He was a serious guy with a brown, poker-straight bowl-cut. He very much wanted a division championship. He didn’t put his athletes in the races they enjoyed or aspired to. He put them in the races where they had the most likelihood of earning him points. This was logical, I guess—the goal of sports is to win. But if you never placed first, second, or third, he didn’t pay you much attention. And if you usually scored points but flopped that day, he ignored you. He was noticeably enlivened by the athlete who had a great race, sliced seconds off her PR, and claimed first-place. Fist-pump for that girl!

I’d always liked running. It felt good to my body. In my best years, I was the third-fastest long-distance runner on the team. This meant I earned points only if the other team offered little competition. This meant I was a barely useful commodity. Still, I busted my ass for that single third-place point. I left it all on the track, as they say. At my senior year banquet, the coach awarded me “Most Determined”…  or “Tries Harding-est”… or some other superlative. “This next runner isn’t the fastest or most talented, but…” he said, before calling my name, and I knew it was me.

Trying-Harding-est, 90s edition

Did I even like racing? I don’t think so. The way to run, though, at least in my American public-school world, was to race. To strive for points. To be as fast as possible. Speed was the unquestioned virtue. I let running, as an enjoyable way to move my body, get commoditized into a way to prove my worth.

I also played field hockey, which I was hilariously bad at. In my five years as an offender, I never once scored a goal. My track coach didn’t approve. Playing field hockey meant I couldn’t run cross country in the fall. Each year he asked, “Are you on the varsity hockey team?”

I was not.

“Then there’s no point in playing,” he said.

No point in playing. The point of sports was acquiring actual points. Not learning how to be in your body. Not learning how to work with a team. In hockey, I didn’t acquire points. So I should run track, where maybe I could actually be worth something.

I played hockey anyway. It seems I wasn’t a total servant to commoditizing myself. My best friends were on that hockey team, and we got to wear short pleated skirts—a legit perk during the pinnacle of nineties preppy.

In my four years on the track team, we runners never won the division championship. Our coach’s annual disappointment was palpable.

***

I don’t mean to blame my coach for whatever obsessions I’ve acquired around “proving my worth.” He was just one of countless messengers imparting the values of our culture.

But today, when I find myself squirreling away into my home office, I tell my family I need to “do work”—I need to “get stuff done.” What I really want is to stare out the window, and occasionally look down at a book. I want to “do nothing.” It’s always been Herculean-hard to give myself permission. Maybe you can relate.

Efficiency, speed, productivity—these are the virtues of what Hersey calls “Grind Culture.” These are the holdovers of the Industrial Revolution, when workers were literally compared to machines. These, too, are the holdovers from chattel slavery, when human worth was measured by the capacity to make someone a profit.

“We are grind culture,” Tricia Hersey writes—or says, if you listen to the audio book, which I highly recommend.

She means that the message of commoditizing our bodies and our time doesn’t exist in a stale monolith. There are no actual buildings called “White Supremacy” and “Capitalism” and “Ableism” from whence these values walk out and impart their bad wisdom… although now I’m wondering what the messengers would wear. White painters’ coveralls? Pin-stripe suits?

When I think of the notorious -isms we deal with, I think of monoliths like these. (Photo credit: @charlybron, Unsplash)

There’s just us, subconsciously passing along the belief that we are only worthy if we are doing and achieving.

And I fall into this belief all-the-damn-time. I track-coach myself into producing and achieving, and then measure what I produce and achieve, and decide whether it is enough. It never quite is.

There are good books about this. Most recently, How to Do Nothing & Do Nothing, both of which I enjoyed. But neither have been the antidote quite like Tricia Hersey’s manifesto, which I recommend listening to while lying supine in bed.

Tricia Hersey is an ordained minister. Her Nap Ministry is deeply rooted in her faith. You can’t even get past the first book of Genesis—a book that informs three major world religions—without encountering a basic tenant of several faiths: The worth of every human is divinely gifted. You don’t need to prove it.

Years ago, I took my two daughters to a new-to-us Episcopal church. The Sunday school leader—a white man in his forties—dumped a bunch of small plastic bags onto a table. Each plastic bag was filled with the parts to make one ladybug: black head, red body with black spots, black wire antennae. The kids were instructed to assemble and glue the parts so they each made a ladybug.

Real ladybug, not assembly-line ladybug (by Christian Papaux, Unsplash)

The kids bent their heads over their fingers. They tried to glue bits together. Antennae kept falling off. Red bodies wonkily adhered to black bug heads.

When the leader saw one kid’s efforts, he frowned. “Who’s gonna buy that?” he said. “Remember, this is for the craft fair.”

Even Sunday school crafts can get commoditized.

It’s worth nothing that Episcopal churches are pro-LGBTQ, pro-women-clergy. As it turns out, just because a church is affirming of the many ways people are human (gay, female, non-binary, trans, etc.) doesn’t mean that same church has shaken the dehumanizing priorities of capitalism.

***

Our track team’s sprinting coach was Mr. Burton, a Black man in his mid-twenties who had trained with World-Record-holder Carl Lewis. We—mostly white but also Black and Latina girls of suburban Philly—asked him to tell us his 400-meter time. He did. Our mouths dropped. Forty-seven seconds, if I remember right. He just rolled his eyes at himself. He was seconds away from the Olympics. To him, those seconds were eons.

Mr. Burton actually ran with his sprinters, several paces ahead. He shouted encouragement over his shoulder, half muffled by the wind. As a distance runner, I didn’t work with him, but I noticed that when a girl puked on the sidelines after she bombed a race, he didn’t ignore her like Head Coach. He patted her back, offered kind words, told her tomorrow was another day.

In our stretching circles, as we butterflied our legs and reached our toes, he asked us to get quiet, close our eyes, and imagine our races. This was decades before mindfulness became a Target commodity. In this same stretching circle, he became the first person I ever heard mention that our energy levels would ebb and flow with our menstrual cycles. Yep, he was the first person—and for a very long time, the only one—to explain to me that my body had a rhythm of energy that I could respect and work with, not rail against or ignore.

It’s not that Mr. Burton didn’t value speed. But in his coaching, he imparted the values of so much more. Two values—dreaming, listening—are ones that Tricia Hersey promotes in her book. He was like the anti-commoditizing coach. How did he become this way? Was it his Blackness? His proximity to elite athleticism? His dashed Olympic ambitions? A combination of these, and more? I’ll never know.

I just know we loved running for him.

***

I still like running. It feels good to my body, alleviates my anxiety, and helps me make better decisions. It also gives me a reason to listen to JOSEPH’s “White Flag” at an insane volume.

But I’ve learned that there are two different ways to go for a run. You can run to *achieve* it. This means you can aim to finish in a certain time or reach a certain distance, or even just to cross it off your to-do.

You can also run for the sake of it. When I do the latter, I ease into the run. I don’t hustle or try to achieve. I just let my legs and arms propel me. Sometimes my pace is the same as, or faster than, my try-hard runs. Sometimes it’s slower. Regardless, I enjoy the smooth, quickened rhythm of my heart and breath. I let the run run me.

This is the kind of “doing” that I’m interested in lately. This is “doing without doing”—or, as the Taoists would say, wei wu wei. It strikes me that “doing without doing” might look very similar to the kind of “doing” that is propelled by ambition.

I’ve run to get faster. I’ve also run for the delight in the rhythm of my pulse and breath.

I’ve written to get published. I’ve also written for the good of the work, because I’ve been summoned by Something Larger Than Me to make something, to co-create.

But the energy I bring to the doing is different. One is labored, tiring, driven by the whip of a “never-enough” mind.

The other is fueling. Generative. It also contains surrender. Which means, if it’s terrible, it’s not my “fault.” And if it’s great, it’s not really my credit. This is liberating.

So, when I say I want to do nothing, I don’t mean I want to ignore my children or forget my work and watch Netflix ad nauseam. I mean, I’m interested in meeting my responsibilities, not through the determination of my own strength, but via something bigger that works through me. Like a run that finds its own rhythm.

Meanwhile, my big dumb ego is hopefully napping in the bleachers.

How about you? Do you ever catch a tangible way that those monolothic entities (like capitalism, ableism, white supremacy, etc.) have transmitted their values? Worked their way into your bones? Sometimes naming them helps uproot them.