Restoring Margin

You're not behind.

You may feel like you're behind because you haven't accomplished your to-do list or gotten to inbox zero or have your side hustle rocking like your neighbour next door. (News flash, neither does he.)

I repeat: you are not behind. You just feel behind because we live in a time where doing is valued over being. We value accomplishment so much that even our leisure has a productive note to it. When we get some spare time, we can feel paralyzed because we don't know what to do with it.

Could it simply be enjoyed?

I recently opened up Douglas Coupland's coffee table book "everywhere is anywhere is anything is everything." I opened it because I couldn't read deeply, my mind was too tired (maybe you can relate to this.) Instead, I turned brightly coloured pages, taking in Douglas Coupland's print-based exhibition, "Slogans for the 21st Century." These text-based works consist of thought-provoking statements, conceived by the artist, that have been boldly printed on brightly coloured backgrounds and are arranged in a manner meant to bombard the viewer, much the same way digital memes and other advertising media do.

Instead of feeling bombarded though, my eyes slowly moved from one rectangle to the next, focusing on reading each of Coupland's "slogans," until one made me stop.

It said: "When life becomes a line-up of tasks your sense of time begins to shrink."

Unstructured time is a rare commodity. So rare, in fact, that your mind may have done a double-take reading that last sentence.

Unstructured time.

As in, no structure. Space for our minds to rest and wander. Accomplishing nothing. Nothing.

We all exist in a highly structured time that glorifies the left brain but deprecates the right. When we rest the left brain (the language, logic, facts, detail, analysis, objectivity, linear thinking side) we stimulate the right brain (the intuition, imagination, relationships, feelings side.)

Chronic doers: We need to rest the processing capacity of our brains.

The restful brain (the wondering, daydreaming brain) is the brain state of greatest creativity and new insight. It needs to be at play for big things to happen, for those mountains to be moved, for new solutions to an existing problem to be thought of, for our long-term biological health.

Credit: Douglas Coupland

So, here is a #jomoquest for you: Create a blank hole in your schedule for at least one hour.

Give your brain a mini-vacation. No cheating: no input or output of any kind, no screens, no laundry, no planning, no guilt. Just permission. Fill it with unhurried pleasure and space - whatever that means to you.

I'll do the same.