Arms full of bags and no way to open your own front door

Two days ago I found myself face to face with my agenda. There it was, a Jenga tower of tasks for the week, every column stacked to the top, and I had two days, Thursday and Friday, to clear everything urgent before the weekend pulled my head somewhere else. I started moving cards around: this one closes on Thursday no matter what, this one can wait until next Friday. The usual sorting, urgent versus important.

It's that feeling of arms full of bags and no way to open your own front door. There's no way to add anything new until you put something down first.

There's an end of year kind of restlessness in the air, in the middle of July. It's not just the mild heat we've had these past two days here in Buenos Aires, in the dead of winter, carrying a smell of summer that has no business being here. It's something else: the mix of World Cup fever and school winter break that rushes everyone at once. "I wish days had forty eight hours," people say. To which I say: it's not about time, it's about what we do with it.

In the pile of obligations I'd scheduled, two cards floated to the surface that I wasn't expecting: finish that book I started months ago, and start meditating. Almost a rescue.

And there, my agenda, near gospel, because whatever I write down there gets done, never postponed, never forgotten, did its job with this too. I asked myself the question: do I pack the laptop, or do we do nothing for five days?

But what does doing nothing even mean? Doing nothing has a terrible reputation. Your head gets heavy when you're not crossing something off, you convince yourself you're falling behind. It gives you an anxiety that feels like it comes from being rushed, but it doesn't, it comes from not having done.

A collapse, with style.

Doing nothing is absolutely necessary. When you do nothing, fresh air gets into your head. It's not the absence of something, it's a space with its own shape, its own rhythm. The strange part is we treat that pause like a problem to solve quickly, when really it's what holds everything else up. Without that air, even discipline turns into autopilot.

I'm not packing the laptop, but I'm packing homework anyway. Two cards, nothing more. Read, meditate, less to-dos than reminders: "don't forget you also need to unplug." I'm tricking my own head: I give it a task of doing nothing, so it thinks it's still being productive while really it's just breathing.

J.