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
Humans are born with pursuits: some search for fame, some go after money, some seek achievements in professional fields, and some only wish their lives to be content . If one wants to become content with life, one should alter one’s old ways of living and embrace new things. Both in Cathy Jewison’s The Prospector’s Trail and Eva Lis Wuorio’s The Singing Silence, the main characters used to be dissatisfied with life. In search for true happiness, they begin to try things that they have never experienced before. At the end, the two protagonists find that their new activities can bring them happiness, and they start to live satisfying lives.
“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.
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
...“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.
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.
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.
Throughout the book Into The Wild, Chris McCandless repeatedly display his individual views and traits. Chris would purposely do things that society would look down upon to emphasize the fact that he was an individual and not mindlessly following the crowd like many people do. His eagerness to break societal rules wasn’t without purpose, in fact, Chris’ life “Hummed with meaning and purpose. But the meaning he wrested from existence lay beyond the comfortable path” (Krakauer 184). The quote is explaining that everything Chris did had a purpose even though it may have seemed buried or unreachable. Even though he did not value the things that most people deem as normal, he found purpose in his journey. One important trait, which influenced his individualism, was his disregard for what others thought about him. Chris did things for himself and not to please others; this disregard for other people’s opinions was present even when he was a sophomore in high school. His sister, Carine stated, “He didn’t care that it wasn’t a cool thing to do” (Krakauer 120). She then went on to say, “He didn’t seem interested in the money so much as the fact that he was good at making it” (Krakauer 120). It can be taken fr...
Susan Wolf, born in 1952, is widely considered one of the greatest philosophers of the 20th and 21st century. One of Wolf’s most renowned works is The meanings of Lives, which drew a lot of attention in the philosophical world for a number of questions that arose from it. Arguably her most widely debated and questioned assertion in The meanings of Lives is “If you care about yourself you’re living as if you’re the center of the universe, which is false.” This however I don’t not believe to be true. Every human being, no matter how successful or unsuccessful, has the right to care for them sleeves and not believe they are the center of the universe while doing so.
“It was becoming a habit—this concentration on things behind him. Almost as though there were no future to be had.” (Morrison 35).
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
...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.
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.
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