As of Friday, I am now unemployed and back in relax-mode for the first time since Spain. As part of my relax-mode, I have to come up with trivial activities for myself to fill up my day and avoid spending the whole day in bed eating donuts and watching reality television. If I give into the donuts to early on in relax-mode, I start to enter depressed-mode and then eventually stop getting out of bed all together.
So, as part of my new schedule, I go to Bikram Yoga every morning (for those of you unfamiliar with Bikram, it is yoga in a sauna with lots of hairy and unattractive people, but it takes a couple hours all together and is one of the least expensive hobbies I could come up with - oh, and I enjoy it). This morning at Bikram, the Yogi (I think that's what they are called) who was leading the class was telling us about how a friend of hers came up with switching around the phrase "Don't just sit there - Do something!" to "Don't just do something - Sit there!" Initially, I assumed that she had just smoked too much pot and there was nothing behind what she was saying, but she briefly explained herself and there's actually some wisdom to that statement.
The idea is that people tend to say harsh things they don't mean or make erroneous decisions when they impulsively react to a situation instead of taking the time to sit and think out what their approach to a given situation will be. I started thinking about how often I have made a neutral situation worse by doing something just for the sake of doing something and decided that my mantra for my unemployment spurt (this one, at least) will be to just sit there rather than doing something just for the sake of having something to do. So, even though I have all these trivial activities lined up, I am only really partaking in things I enjoy (e.g. wine tasting, Bikram, dog training classes with Daisy) rather than doing things just for the sake of filling my day. And I'm trying to perfect my art of not doing something and just sitting there.
Although this is the first week day I have free (and I had a job interview today so I don't know if that even counts as having a free day), it is going very well so far.
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