Not Doing Anything

I sat shotgun in the Sprinter van and looked out the window at all the cars, and the sad people in them. I looked out the windshield at the snake of cars ahead of us. They weren’t moving. They hadn’t moved in minutes. Up till now we had crept up in the traffic, inching our way slowly to the mouth of the tunnel, but now we were stuck.

I wasn’t doing anything but dying of boredom. I could only sit there, and wait for the boredom to pass. In Manhattan there would be traffic, but there would also be people to watch. As much as it might be pleasing in the moment to hit those people, they would supply my eyes with some entertainment outside of the obnoxious voices of the radio.

Bodies and minds always hit a breaking point during this ordeal, and motivation is extinguished upon arrival home. The mind and body demand relaxation from the spirit torture of traffic exhaustion.

Listening to music, reading a book, watching a video, all social media.....it is all an entertaining distraction from the hellish commute. This commute is one reason that living in the city (and its surrounding sprawl) erodes patience, motivation and intellect.

I had to get home and do something with my brain and my body. First I spoke to my roommate, who was in the same place on the couch when I left in the morning. She was bored enough from a similar type of endless, relaxing media consumption to want to talk to me about my day. It was a miracle.

Conversation is the first step to thinking. Doing is the second step, and for me, writing counts as doing. But doing is work. (Writing is work.) After a commute, working seems like more....work. Sometimes we need reminding that relaxation isn’t earned simply because we reached home. We can relax for a moment, but too much relaxing too soon leads to less motivation and less doing. It leads to more mindless media consumption. A second wind is always needed when the spirit is depleted, and it has to be equal parts motivating and relaxing. It has to use the brain and the body. In this case the body is the mouth.

Using my mouth lead me to work out my body. I exhausted my body. That was good. Though my mind was engaged, it was never exhausted. I focused too much on my body’s exhaustion as an excuse not to exhaust my mind. Exhaustion is temporary. Our body can withstand remarkable exhaustion if we treat it right. It is all mentality.

Temperance is a virtue that traffic exhaustion tries to murder. Don’t ever let tunnel traffic deplete the spirit.