“Don’t Just Sit There, Do Something!”
This is
an especially touchy column because it was my mother-in-law
who always said this one. (Also, it is the one that the
title for this ongoing column was taken from -- so it better be good!)
Don't just sit there, do something.
Now, don't misunderstand. She liked
me, my mother-in-law did -- she still likes me, I hope. She will still like me
after she reads this column, I think. She didn’t single
me out for the advice. She said it to everyone. “Be up
and doing!” “Get off your duff!” “Be active!” “Don't let any moss grow under your feet!” Even, “An idle
mind is the devil’s workshop.” And she said it by example
as well as with words. If there was ever anyone more active
than my grandmother, it is my mother-in-law. Sitting down
is just not part of her modus operandi. She is eight-five
as I write this and can still beat me at bowling! (Or weeding
a garden, or practically anything else we ever happen to
do together.)
Well, it
is better to be “up and doing” than to be down and
drooping. No question. Always has been, always will be.
But something
has changed! We have evolved into a society where
there is so much going on that we are always
acting and doing, sometimes at the expense of thinking and
feeling.
In a less
urban, less mechanized, less complex and competitive time,
there were natural seasons and periods of reflection and
repose. There were natural “breaks” after the planting
or after the harvest, and when it got dark at night, work
was done.
Not so today!
We may have business cycles, but none of them involved rest.
We have weekends, but they’re usually the time to do the
work we couldn’t get to during the week. And we have evenings,
but the night belongs to homework with the kids, or to working
overtime, or to trying to “play as hard as we work.”
*
One evening,
after a particularly long and hectic day, I was eating a
late meal by myself in the kitchen and overhearing Linda’s
discussion in the living room with our fourteen-year-old
Josh.
He was
saying that he’d had a tough day, too, starting with his
five a.m. paper route and two tests in school. Linda was
reminding him that his piano lesson was tomorrow and he
hadn’t practiced -- and that the dishwasher (his job) was still unemptied.
He was telling his mother that he had some math homework
to do and he had to finish a scout merit-badge requirement
before next week’s Court of Honor, but that the most important
basketball game of the year was going into the second half
on TV. He also mentioned that he’d promised his friend,
Chad, that he’d go over and see his new computer game.
Linda,
being my mother-in-law’s daughter, offered her usual advice,
but in her frustration with her own and her son’s busyness,
it came out backward:
“Well,
don’t just do something -- sit there!”
I went
in and joined them for a good laugh, but as our amusement
subsided, we realized that under the circumstances, the
reversed cliché was better advice than the original.
Josh
had more to do than he possibly could do that night (just
as most of us have more to do than we can most of the time),
and rather than just doing something, what he needed to do was to sit there
for a few minutes and decide what mattered most
or figure out some way to get some things done now
and some later.
*
We sometimes
let ourselves get infected with the notion that any action
is preferable to any inaction, that doing is superior
to thinking, that doing something -- anything -- is better than occasionally doing nothing at all so
we can sit and think instead.
In a world
where there is an endless number of things to do, we can
become fanatic, frantic, whirlwinds of activity working
ourselves to an exhausted frazzle each day and yet looking
back over the weeks and months and not being able to see
much progress. Like someone sawing furiously with a dull
saw, we keep doing something and tire and stress
ourselves, never taking time to just sit there and
sharpen our saw.
We need
the new maxim that Linda coined by the slip of her tongue:
