The real vacation is doing nothing

Even vacations have a soul that can be summed up in a few words: doing nothing. Regardless of the physical location, what matters is the mental approach with which we manage to truly enjoy our breaks, without wasting them. There are people who simply can't help but organize, plan, and schedule: for them, vacation can turn into a nightmare. On the contrary, those who manage to unplug in the full sense of the word, you will discover the absolute pleasure of do nothing.

Protecting the soul of a vacation means freeing it from everything that can bring stress, anxiety, and fatigue. Time expands, empty spaces widen, commitments are canceled: everything is decided on the spot, in the complete freedom of one's desires. Doing nothing means filling the day with downtime, pauses, slowness, and therefore emotions, even just a sunset stroll on the beach or at high altitude.

The holiday of doing nothing imposes a technological truce, and must be interpreted as an opportunity to be seized for a digital detoxFor once, smartphones, PCs, and tablets do what we want them to do. They're silent. And if the television is turned on at all, it's to lull us with an old movie, a black-and-white drama, a nature documentary, and certainly not to accumulate the poisonous anxieties spread by talk shows.

Even doing one thing at a time, slipping out of the multitaskingIt's a curve in the universe of doing nothing. It means avoiding overlapping activities, which risks nullifying their pleasure in a cacophony of combined actions. On vacation, you can go for a walk without headphones to listen to music. Leave your smartphone on standby to send messages, scroll through the news, take photos, and shoot videos. Read without having to rush for a social commitment. Simple breaks, but deeply detoxifying from the poison of the speed imposed as a lifestyle.

Uno studio published Science In 2014, he showed how difficult it is for many people to be alone, doing nothing, even for just a few minutes: many of them would prefer a mild electric shock to the sensation of doing nothing. Another search, also from 2014, published on Plose One, shows how moments of "wakeful rest", without doing anything, without external stimulii, allow the brain to better retain what it has just learned. During these pauses, the brain is able to stabilize newly formed memories, making them stronger and more long-lasting, and thus strengthening its memory capacity.

Already in Greek philosophy, the idea of ​​rest was often associated with "doing nothing." Aristotle distinguished the effort and commitment of work, to satisfy man's vital needs, from school, free time to devote to idleness, rest, and contemplation, free from deadlines and material worries and also willing to delve into the spiritual dimension. That term, scholé, has become the etymological ancestor of our word “school”, as opposed toascholia, the time spent working. In Latin times, Seneca wrote a text entitled Of leisure, in which he emphasized how "doing nothing" is a necessary choice not to remain inert and passive, but to better discover oneself. With an evangelical parable, Seneca explained that just as the soil needs to rest to produce better, so the soul and body of man are strengthened by pauses that help to recover lucidity, a sense of proportion, and to reconstruct the moments in which that time we have in abundance, we waste so much, too much. 

Confucius He was very clear about the need to do nothing, saying that acting continuously, without pause or discernment, leads nowhere and is actually counterproductive. He also used a parable to explain the vitality of doing nothing. A group of disciples from his agora decide to spend a spring day doing nothing, simply walking along the river with friends, bathing in the water, and singing on the way home. For Confucius, this is the right choice when it's time to do nothing, and abandon oneself, without commitments, to the pleasures of serenity, friendship, and direct contact with nature.

In Christianity, the Bible recalls that God created the world in six days, while on the seventh he decided to rest and do nothing. And in the Gospels, it is Jesus who frequently withdraws, stepping back even from his preaching, and abandoning himself to contemplation, which from that moment on in the Christian tradition is perfectly integrated with action, in a symbiosis in which one cannot exist without the other.

The modern text most consistent with the idea of ​​the importance of doing nothing is certainly the essay In Praise of Idleness Written in 1932 by philosopher Bertrand Russell, who saw technological progress as an opportunity to work less and free up more time to do nothing and live better. Russell certainly could not have imagined that, on the contrary, the powerful and rapid evolution of technology would drag us towards what the German philosopher of Korean origin Byung-Chu Han has defined as The society of tiredness, from the title of his essay, first published in 2010: a contemporary world dominated by the anxiety of doing, without pause, with many prohibitions, rules, and disciplines, and with constant self-exploitation. A trap from which, according to Han, the only escape is contemplation, silence, pauses, and slowness. The natural ingredients of doing nothing.