#8 Being Lazy

In life, you have to do five things, says my Grandma — eat, sleep, work, exercise, and be lazy.

“Liane, do you know which one I’m the best at?” she says. “Being lazy.”

“Liane, do you know which one you’re the worst at?” she says. “Being lazy.”

By the way, all of this sounds cuter in Cantonese.

Some weeks I have a string of days where I begin at 7 am with an online meeting, receiving a coaching session, providing a coaching session, taking a class, or leaving the house to make it to a breakfast meeting on time. On those days I will wake up by 6 am to get in my morning reading, journaling/scribbling, walk, and some simple Qi Gong — breath work, an even slower relative of Tai Chi. Sometimes these same days close with a rehearsal or a workshop starting around 8 pm and ending around 10 pm somewhere in town and with an hour commute to get home if I want to spend 20 HKD or half an hour commute if I want to spend 200 HKD on a taxi.

Being lazy?

My days might look like my day is very long, then you’ll see that there are big gaps in the middle. A few days each month, I find myself approaching a day where I feel pinned down. I wake up and I simply cannot lift myself to sitting.

What am I doing with those big gaps?

Writing for projects, project managing, thinking about taxes, actually doing something about taxes, negotiating with someone who can help me with my taxes, wondering what am I going to eat, when I will do my laundry, the next business network event, who can help me with the next business network event, having coffee with that person, following up with that person, following up with someone I said I would follow up with then turning around and updating them, then marketing our decisions to everyone. Writing WhatsApp to friends and contacts, drafting snippets of a newsletter, reading the news, reading science, wondering when am I going to practice music for the singing group. Back to business, follow up with that lead, what should I offer them, should I consult them again to get more clear on what they’d like to offer, after all this negotiation, do I even have energy to do the work they want me to do?

Like thirty browser tabs open in one window, items in my brain line up single file, visible all at once but too small and numerous to see their names.

Without their names, I forget what they are. I forget their order of importance. I forget why they were opened. I forget that they are opened.

Knowing I need to get something done, I might minimize these tabs and open a new window. This window is just for this topic.

How about a project on the genetic causes for people of Asian ancestry to have dry flaky earwax and for people of European and African ancestry to have gooey sticky earwax.

Ooo, it turns out it’s a single DNA base. Open a tab to read about how they know.

Some reports say that it’s linked to body odor as well. Open four more tabs to fact check.

Ooo look, there’s a whole hundreds-year old industry of tools for ear-cleaning in China. Open five tabs for images and five tabs for history.

How was this first detected? Two tabs to get to that report.

Any updates to the story since 2012? Six tabs.

Before I know it, I’ve built a new spinal cord of browser tabs across the screen and filled my mind with servings from everything this buffet offers but, even when it’s full somehow it keeps consuming.

No time to digest, mentally or physically.

The mind goes into some flurry of reading what’s in front of it, searching for a tab amongst those already open, feeling overwhelmed either at the number of tabs or not seeing what it’s looking for or both, giving up and opening more.

At some point amidst this flurry, consciously or unconsciously, I hit that upper right corner ×

Everything goes away. Everything.

My mind slows to a crawl and so does my body.

That’s when I wake up pinned down flat to my bed. Pinned down by nothing.

Forced to be lazy, but it’s not fun. It’s more like being incapable, I can’t even enjoy it.

Recently, I have more days where I get closer to being lazy. It’s a proactive process.

When that happens, it’s great. A handful of tabs get opened in my mind, I either make use of each one or decide that it does not serve my purpose and close it. In a reasonable amount of time, I can close all the tabs to a window in my mind. Closing conversations with friends or telling them I’m deferring. Saying no to events. Reducing my meetings. Deciding not to decide. Deciding on what I must or really want to.

I sleep with less lingering.

Being lazy is an active practice.

—

Day 8 of Don’t Break the Chain — a master writing course by Cole Schafer. Today’s prompt: “choose a word that means something to you” and then, “write an essay about a mistake you find yourself repeating again and again while sprinkling this word throughout the piece in the places (and at the frequency) where it makes sense to you.”