Marginalia ~ The Art of Doing Nothing

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Two of the things I’ve been watching and reading, as you’ll see below the line.

Hi everyone,

According to the physicist Lawrence Krauss:

“Richard Feynman used to go up to people all the time and he'd say, ‘You won't believe what happened to me today.’ And people would say, ‘What?’ And he'd say, ‘Absolutely nothing’. Because we humans believe that everything that happens to us is special and significant.”

Now, I’m no less susceptible than anyone else to the idea that what happens to me is significant, but I was reminded of Feynman’s little game this week while practicing the painfully difficult art of doing nothing. That should be capitalised as Doing Nothing, because practicing this as a conscious effort is very different from listlessly idling away time out of boredom or to procrastinate from things you don’t want to do.