At the end of most of our sessions, my therapist asks, “How do you feel right now?”
For a long time, my answer was, “I feel productive.”
“But … ‘productive’ isn’t a feeling,” she would say, politely.
“It isn’t?”
I
used to feel productive — or unproductive — all the time. Those were
almost the only two things I felt at all. Productive meant good.
Unproductive was very bad.
Until the early months of the pandemic. Suddenly, I was sitting still, and I couldn’t do
much because I wasn’t supposed to. I was working from home, but when I
was done, I just sat there (I’m single and don’t have kids). No matter
how many Zoom calls I had with family and friends, there was more time
... for nothing. Because of that, all of the real feelings I’d
stuffed into boxes for years came flooding out. Grief, loneliness, fear,
and weird spikes of happiness. There were new feelings related to the
pandemic — like guilt, for having food, work, and shelter.
My therapist said all this new feeling was healthy, and as an advice columnist, I knew she was right.
Nothing was very good for me. Weirdly, it made me better at doing something later.
That’s
why when I saw two self-help books — published in the last year — about
niksen — the Dutch wellness practice of doing nothing — I grabbed them.
I wanted more nothing in my life, but I wanted to do it correctly.
We’re supposed to do nothing to be healthy, niksen supporters say. It’s not being lazy, it’s just ... being.
Olga Mecking’s “Niksen: Embracing the Dutch Art of Doing Nothing” was released in January as a response to her 2019 New York Times article about
the practice, which went viral. In the book, Mecking, who was born in
Poland and lives in the Netherlands, writes of her article, “It became
very clear that I had hit a nerve. The whole world wanted to know about
niksen. Media from around the globe were sending me emails and interview
requests. Literary agents and publishers were asking to represent me. I
was ready to dismiss it as much ado about nothing (literally), but
there was something about niksen that seemed to appeal to people
everywhere.”
People
were doing too much and didn’t know how to stop. Even when they had
time away from responsibilities, the act of mindfulness — another
wellness concept — felt like doing something.
She
writes, “I had people near and far asking me for advice on how to find
more niksen time. ‘I don’t know,’ I would say, ‘sit down for five
minutes, and just do it!’ That wasn’t very helpful, I’m afraid. Doing
nothing doesn’t come naturally to everyone. ‘Just do it’ bypasses
important questions. Why can’t we do nothing? Why is it so hard?”
Mecking struggles to define what it means to do nothing. Much of her book is about why we do everything but.
She delves into wellness trends and the influence of technology. She
considers why we’re so busy — including how public policy and government
affects what we carry in our brains all day. In a chapter about why
Dutch women might be happier, she writes, “Dutch women rarely experience
the burdens felt by women in other countries who are required to take
care of not just their children but also their aging parents. Most Dutch
people will agree that caring for children is the parents’
responsibility but caring for the elderly is a job for the government.
State-run homes for the elderly are a fact of life and accessible for
all.”
As
far as a how-to goes, I got a surprising amount of guidance from
another book, Dutch journalist’s Maartje Willems’ March 16 release, “The Lost Art of Doing Nothing: How the Dutch Unwind with Niksen.”
It looks more like a coffee table gift book, partly because of the
lovely illustrations by Lona Aalders. Some pages are just quotes from
famous people. But there are questions to answer and exercises to try.
One page offers a pretty illustration, just to look at. I focused on the
tiny pictures of bees. A later page suggests switching your phone to
airplane mode. Yes, easier said than done.
There’s
also a running theme about time (Mecking writes about time, too) — that
maybe niksen happens when the clock is irrelevant. It’s not like
meditation, something you might schedule to do for 15 minutes or an
hour. How can you do nothing if you’re on a clock?
The
more I read Mecking’s and Willems’s separate interrogations of how we
got so scheduled, and how we can make space, the more I figured out how I
achieve “nothing,” and how, for me, it involves some spontaneity. You
can’t always plan for it, and that’s sort of the point.
Sure,
I might try for some good niksen on a wandering walk around my
neighborhood, sometimes noticing a bird. But then birds make me think of
my colleague and friend Ty Burr who loves birds,
and then I think about how I miss my friends and I should call them
(hey, Ty). Then I’m back to the to-do list. It’s no longer nothing.
Mecking argues that Netflix and TV are not nothing. But I disagree.
These books made me realize I’m in a deep state of niksen — real nothing — when I watch “Castle” with my friend Lilly.
Yes,
I mean “Castle,” the procedural crime show that ran from 2009 to 2016,
the one that’s “Bones” meets “Murder She Wrote.” Lilly and I watch and
talk aboutthe show on an app from our two homes. Sometimes we
just grunt approval when the detectives solve a crime. It’s not that I’m
not thinking about anything while we watch, but I’ll be honest, my head
is mostly empty. A crime discovered, a crime solved. Characters evolve,
but in no way do they make me think about my own life. I rarely notice
the clock. I’m not even watching it to be part of a cultural
conversation; the show had its finale years ago.
I would have thought of it as gluttonous behavior, but now, partly because of therapy and these books, I don’t.
The
experience just is. It is not productive, but it feels serene. I no
longer find it strange that after a night of Castle-niksen, I wake up
ready to do. To be a good person in the world. To feel. To be happy.
Meredith Goldstein and Christina Tucker
are delving into self-help books once a month. Tell them about
self-help books you like – and how you practice niksen – at
Meredith.Goldstein@Globe.com.
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