Few circumstances illuminate the principle behind "
allow yourself do nothing" as well as falling ill.
One minute you are thinking in terms of, 'I am—and I am going—to do these 100 action items on my to-do list, now' and the next minute you are shivering under the weight of the your body's reaction to a parasite—the malaria causing Plasmodium Falciparum.
To witness the experience as it unfolds is to be made intimate with the truth:
You are capable of more than you know AND your capabilities have limits.
Where is willpower when you collapse onto the floor as a result of intense fever born out a cytokine storm as your body activates and deactivates areas of you in an effort to flush out parasites burrowing through your red blood cells and killing you from the inside?
Yet...
Where would you be if the faculties that make it possible for you to exercise your willpower went offline when, at those brief moments of consciousness, you were able to place a call or send a note to an emergency contact?
A revisit of the concept to 'allow yourself do nothing' is pertinent here because the mode allows you take onboard the complexity of reality. And, it is the birthplace of anxiety-free accomplishment.
To engage the mode is to surrender the illusion you are in any kind of control. It enables you to inhabit three truths:
- You are in constant exchange with your situation.
- Your situation is constantly shifting
- Shifting the exchange to meet the shifting situation is essential.
It is in shifting the exchange to meet the shifting situation that you might run into trouble, as what tends to happen is an assumption of control of the situation.[1]
This is what an allowance to do nothing solves. It arrests demands for activities, thereby enabling two things:
- A surrender of responsibility to take on activities beyond your purview. And,
- A witnessing of the activities that do actually matter.
Inhabiting the allowance brings into effect an adeptness at shifting the exchange to meet the shifting situation.
It is worth rehashing that the allowance doesn't permit for an arrest of activities but an arrest of the demand for activities.
What this does is release the tension that builds from the weight of the demands. A release of the tension invites clarity. And clarity reveals the way.
Because of the ever-shifting nature of your situation, the exchange to meet it, which can be thought of as a traverse between what you can do and what you cannot do, has to be imbued with continuity. Which is to say, as you move through the dial of capability, from incapable to capable, a start or restart can be visited upon halted activities.
In truth, this is essential for getting things done.
It is what your body does when it senses a parasitic invader. It dials down capability, halting some activities in favour of critical others. And once the invader is eradicated it resumes halted activities.
This is the wisdom behind an allowance to do nothing: You allow yourself do nothing for a chance to do something.
Notes
- Just because you are are shifting the exchange does not mean you are controlling the situation. A case can be made for how you might be shifting the situation, through shifting the exchange, but that is a far cry from any assertion of control.
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