There’s a wonderful thing I’ve been noticing myself saying recently: I’d rather do nothing.
Literally nothing. Not even in “meditation”—no intention, no practice, no right/wrong.
This is a place of real freedom and power. It’s hard to manipulate me when in any given moment, I have the highly attractive option of doing nothing. Which requires nothing from anyone else. It’s easy to show up early to appointments. It’s no problem when friends or clients are late. “Sorry to keep you waiting,” they say, to which I can joyfully respond “it was nothing.”
It raises the bar for my experience by highlighting the cost of unaligned actions. Seeing my screentime, I think “wow, I would rather have spent x minutes doing nothing today.” When my baseline state of “nothing” has intrinsic value, other options have to be more equally or more worthwhile for me to choose them. Scarcity doesn’t exist in a world where nothing is desirable, which undercuts most urgency and makes everything I do choose to do that much more valuable to me.