Metodi decided to spend Sunday in complete inactivity and do nothing. Not “nothing important,” but doing-nothing — nothing at all. As if he were going to free himself psychologically like a Tibetan monk.
First he turned off all the alarms. Then — the phone, which looked at him reproachfully like an abandoned puppy. But he turned it back on, just to write to everyone that he would not be turning it on.
Naturally, his father and mother called, worried: “Go outside for some air, or you’ll start growing mold.”
His grandmother sent a text message: “Since you’re free, come move my wardrobe for me.”
He sighed: “Sometimes doing nothing is like driving a car with the handbrake on.”
The neighbor upstairs, on the right, started renovating with a drill that turned his head into a sieve. He tried to find the existential answers of the Universe in the clouds filling the window, but his neighbor on the left began playing the melody from Titanic on an accordion, probably in an attempt to drown out the drill.
“I’ll accept it as the soundtrack of freedom,” he reassured himself.
It seemed to him that this was the best time for a warm bath, where he could relax while popping the little bubbles of foam. When the tiles saw him, they begged him to wash them “just in passing.”
The television tried to tempt him with three films whose lines he knew by heart.
He tried lying on the sofa and remembered he hadn’t watered the flowers in three days. But they looked suspiciously alive, as if they could manage perfectly well on their own.
By the afternoon he was already so tired from trying to do nothing that he decided to take a nap. But even there, the muse had abandoned him. He sat on the balcony with a pillow and watched the sun play with the neighbors’ cats. After two hours, he felt alive, hungry, and strangely calm.
He decided to go out without a destination… and ended up straight at the neighborhood shop, where there was a promotion and a queue for yogurt, sausages, and toilet paper.
He came back with two bags, a weekly menu plan, and an entire recipe booklet — a bonus acquired in the company of retired young people.
That evening he lay down with The Art of Calm and fell asleep on page three.
When he woke up, something became clear to him: perhaps “doing nothing” does not mean “fighting the tasks,” but “not paying attention to them.”
“Buryana probably has a whole list of tricks for this,” he thought, “and most likely she would say that today, by doing nothing, I did the most.”