Throughout our lives, the wheel of time never stops turning, and it seems like we don’t cease trying to keep up with it. Then, if we do receive a moment of free time, as the song “Infinity” by One Direction explains, it can feel as if we’re “stuck in motion and the wheels keep spinning ‘round.” These days, people like us have “No time to stand and stare,” (from the poem, “Leisure” by William Henry Davies), but as Anna Quindlen’s essay, “Doing Nothing is Something” discusses, we all need to stop every once in a while to process the world without the burden of relentless activities to attend, so the good that comes from doing nothing can allow ourselves to truly blossom. Today, time is most often considered to be something not to waist on being …show more content…
Do really we want to “pursue frantic and often joyless” activities just to be looked at by others a certain way? Finding who we are and, overall achieving who we personally look to be often involves people “Exploring inside of their own heads” with their time of boredom. “And now I’m one step closer to being two steps far from you.” might be a lyrical form of comparison between finding who we are by taking a moment of time to evaluate ourselves, to being who everyone else expects us to be, like a busy individual. These are steps away from each other, hard to accomplish both tasks because we don’t make time to experience both time absorbing activities and free time. Do we want to observe “Where squirrels hide their nuts in the grass”, care freely, or do we want to go to baseball practice? The choice ultimately ours to make, but in the end, the pressure to look at doing nothing as an unproductive thing might influence our opinions. As a whole, the time to do nothing is a gateway to good things, such as creativity and the creation of us as unique individuals. Sometimes, the time spent on doing nothing is just as important as the time spent on doing something because it is possible that the product of free time can make our lives more fulfilling with the time we
Frantically reliving and watching her previous life, Emily inquires to her parents, ““Do any human beings ever realize life while they live it?—every, every minute?” (Wilder, 182). Emily is terrified on Earth because she knows her future. She is not disappointed with the actions she made on Earth, but she is disappointed that she didn’t appreciate the little actions in life. She carried herself through life like it would never end and she never needed to acknowledge the importance of those little actions. Being an example of the theme that life is a series of thoughtless events that make up one impactful life, Emily wishes she appreciated her small actions instead of taking them for
To Thoreau, life’s progress has halted. It seems people have confused progression with captivity driven by materialism. To Krakaeur, people are indifferent to pursing the sublime in nature. To Christopher McCandles the world around him is forgetting the purpose of life. People are blind to nature. In the eyes of these men the world is victim to commercial imprisonment. People live to achieve statuses that only exist because man made them. Fame, money, and monotonous relationships do not exist in nature; they are the pursuits of soulless fundamentalism. The truth is that people pursue meaningless goals, and people don’t want to hear or know how they are foolish. When exposed, reality is so unsettling that it seems wrong. Yet, to be free of the falseness in life is in essence the point of singularity that people realize if there is no truth in love then it is false, if there is no truth in money then it is worthless, if there is no truth in fame then it is undeserving. Without truth everything is a worthless pursuit of a meaningless glass ceiling.
“It was becoming a habit—this concentration on things behind him. Almost as though there were no future to be had.” (Morrison 35).
“His life was not confining and the delight he took in this observation could not be explained.” (Cheever 216) He had a perfect family, high social status and very few problems in his life, or so he thought. His life is so wonderful that anything objectionable is repressed. Not until he takes the “journey” into realization, where he learns through others that his life has fallen apart.
With our days filled with work, family, and all the other time consuming tasks it is hard to see past to all the beauty that is around us. Society has given us an example to live up too, how we react in certain situations, if we react all. We put conditions on things and how we believe they should be perceived. Anything outside of those conditions that we expect to find, becomes elusive and our appreciation or even awareness of it can be lost if we do not train our minds to take note of our
I blame, in part, a major portion of humanity’s recently-developed inability to live in the moment on the rise of technology and personal communication devices (i.e. smartphones); one cannot spend an hour surfing the internet without seeing a meme depicting disappointed-looking elder family members surrounded by younger ones enthralled by their smartphones, tablets, etc. The same visual is easily spotted on a Saturday evening out, where individuals may be not living in the moment, but rather combing their social media pages for an even better, more exciting or enticing event to attend down the street. Jean-Paul Sartre writes “what fundamentally we desire to appropriate in an object is its being,” that is, life is what we make of it, and Orlean’s idea of an overly-anticipated, excessively built-up Saturday night causes one to dehumanize their experience and fail to live in the moment and truly enjoy and appreciate it. The existentialist would denounce Orlean’s intense expectations of Saturday night and its imposition on virtually everyone to enjoy it, and argue that the experience of Saturday night is relative to each
...“just factors” in attaining pleasure (21). However, if the entire population acts in such a way, there would only be a focus on personal satisfaction and no concern for fellow mankind. Treating people as if they are commodities and physical objects of which one can dispose would breed a sense of entitlement and selfishness. To care and help others would be an obsolete value. The argument of the poem advocates for an immoral behavior of other individuals that would create harsh treatment to others.
I think that what the author was trying to imply in this passage was that in his personal experience, he has noticed that many people take many things for granted and that they don’t live their lives according to what they want and need to do. So much is wasted during one’s lifetime, and people just allow their lives to pass them by.
on what others may be thinking, but Emerson wants people to understand that nothing is important as
Emptying out and allowing the mind to go with the flow is a practice that has been done for centuries. It is applicable in everyday life and with enough practice, anyone can do it. Emptiness is not an easy state to achieve, but with hours of dedication and a calm perseverance anyone can attain an empty, preconception-less mind. In Daodejing, it gives several examples of how we use emptiness on a daily basis. Whether we recognize that power on a daily basis is another point entirely. If someone is not already utilizing the power of emptying out, then they hopefully will see how strong a soft energy can be. Ultimately, emptiness is not restricted to only be a part of professional life, but can be used in friendly and romantic relationships too.
Jean-Paul Sartre (1957) once said "Man is condemned to be free; because, once thrown into the world, he is responsible for everything he does." (23) Whether this is good or bad is not an issue, whereas the implications derived from this are profound. Life, in this case, has no fixed purpose, and we are free to give it one; perhaps it is more appropriate to say that we are condemned to give it one, instead. One look at today's western modernized society makes it seem as if we strive to learn about everything and invent the ultimate tool to carry out all conceivable tasks for us (however artificial the task may be.) Writers, like Albert Camus, describe how waiting, or more generally, boredom, causes the individual to put serious effort into thought of questions regarding one's identity. It is easily seen, thus, that with the way our society has developed, it was inevitable that things like the existential philosophical movement and the literary absurdist movement would emerge from an era of modernism.
Anna Quindlen is the author of the excerpt “Doing Nothing is Something.” The author, formally a New York Times journalist, remains a best-selling author of children’s books. In the excerpt “Doing Nothing is Something,” Quindlen hypothesizes that children these days are over scheduled by the amount of organized activities planned by the children’s parents. Such erroneous philosophies have been disputed in defense of structured, extracurricular activities. The following examination of these contrasting opinions will indeed show that children are not being over scheduled just because they participate in one or two structured activities, and in fact, children thrive when their lives are structured.
...e consciousness of the apathetic, it becomes apparent that many people do not truly realize what state they live in. They actively shun the wonder of the world while at the same time glorifying it. As mentioned previously, this is perhaps the ultimate destructive act. One blinds oneself to danger while consciously trotting upon its path yet simultaneously pronouncing safety as the ideal state of man. Except in this case it is inversed: people denounce empty safety while stepping towards it and away from reality.
People unwittingly create false images of what it is to be human, thereby creating false hopes and expectations. Yeats suggests that since there is no choice but to move forward, one should imagine the fullness of each moment as having an inextricable harmony with all others. Life is like a dance that does exist independent of a dancer but has no shape or form without the dancers.
This is the primary application of the here and now: the whole is more than the sum of its parts. An oriental description of the meaning of the here and now was explained by Buddhist Master Deshimaru when one of his disciples asked him: “What is the meaning of the here and now? He responded: “It is deep philosophy. Here and now means being completely attuned to what you are doing in that instant, with no thought of the past or the future. If you cannot be happy here and now, you will never be happy.” On the other hand, Jules Romains stated that “youth is the time you have ahead of you”, referring to the concept of