Doing nothing

I would say I'm a very active person. I don't like just sitting around doing nothing for too long. During the past semester I danced three times a week, went two the gym at least twice a week, I bike everywhere, work, study and sing in a competitive and ambitious choir . This may sound like a lot, and it is. It's also the reason why, now that it's summer, I take any chance I get to just do nothing.

My parents have a country house about an hour's drive from Stockholm. It's very quiet. And I mean really quiet. Actually dead quiet if you count out the occational shouts from the community beach and boats that float by.

This property is the ultimate relaxing place. Nothing happens here. You get up in the morning, have breakfast, go for a walk, lay out in the sun reading, listening to the radio, have lunch, lay out in the sun some more, watch TV at night and then go to bed. It gets boring after a while, but when we're talking about a weekend, this is bliss.

Usually I'm very concered with eating healthily. I was overly concerned before but I have a more sane approach now. Now all I want is to look good, have the energy to work out, and not clog up my arteries. Fair enough.

But when you're here, you can't care about any of this. Here you just exist. Have ice-cream when you want to, have chocolate when you crave it and most of all, you don't move. You're on your deck chair, you fall in and out of sleep and you breathe. And it's so good for you. Maybe not if you do it for weeks at a time, but for a couple of days, I call it rejuvenation and recuperation. When you get back to reality with all it's stressors, you can take so much more. Your muscles can take more once they've been allowed to rest for a while. It's like you regenerate energy for months at a time by doing just nothing.

Once I become a doctor, I'll make sure I prescribe "do nothing" a lot. I think it can cure a whole lot of things. Especially when we live the way we do these days.