We Are Not Machines (Doing Nothing Heals Us)

I’m typing these words on a laptop after cooking breakfast on a stove, loading a dishwasher full of dishes, and driving my kids to school in a car while listening to music on my phone. Perhaps you can relate. To be alive today is to be surrounded by machines.

It’s no wonder then that our machines shape our thoughts and metaphors. In the past two weeks alone, I’ve heard someone compare their career to an ever-declining escalator that requires non-stop effort to stay competitive and someone else compare an ailing relationship to a car in need of repair.

Humans have always used the physical world to “build” the abstract world of language and concepts, so it makes perfect sense that we turn to mechanical metaphors in an era where machines dominate our lives.

But more often than not these mechanical metaphors are inaccurate and unhelpful. Why? Because we are not machines. We are nature.

If a machine stops working, you have one option: Do something. Take your car to a mechanic, bring your bike to a bike shop, take your phone to a repair store. 

By contrast, nature gives us two options: Do something and do nothing. 

Photo Credit: Unsplash, Esther Tuttle

Do something, do nothing is a concept I likely first heard from the mindfulness teacher Thomas McConkie, who I’ve been learning from for nearly a decade. In a meditation titled “Healing Meditation” on Insight Timer, Thomas guides the listener into a state of stillness and then says, “There’s absolutely nothing you need to do but trust the stillness. You don’t need to do the healing. … Stay soft, stay open. Let the body-mind purge itself of anything it doesn’t need. Let stillness be the tonic, the solution that draws all of this out — everything you don’t need, everything holding you back. Let the healing simply come to you.”

Let the healing simply come to you. If we were machines, such a process would be impossible. No amount of time, stillness, or patience can fix a broken dishwasher. 

But time, stillness, and patience are embedded throughout the natural world, as wisdom teachers have long known. The poet Rainer Maria Rilke writes, “In spite of all the farmer's work and worry, he can't reach down to where the seed is slowly transmuted into summer. The earth bestows.” And Jesus says, “The farmer sleeps at night and is up and around during the day. Yet the seeds keep sprouting and growing, and he doesn't understand how. It is the ground that makes the seeds sprout and grow into plants that produce grain.”

Since the earth bestows and the ground makes seeds sprout, it stands to reason that beyond a certain threshold no amount of watering, weeding, or fertilizing will help your plants grow. In fact, over-watering, over-weeding, and over-fertilizing will only make things worse. 

The same is true of healing from a cut. You can wash and bandage the wound, but beyond that bit of effort you must let nature do the work. Picking at a scab won’t heal you.

The creative process is similar, as are relationships. Sometimes what’s needed is not more effort but long, deep, healing sleep. Or silence. Or a hug. Sometimes (often?) our efforts can even backfire. We might anxiously cling to our view in an argument only to discover that our partner has doubled down on their view in response, placing us further than ever from getting what our heart desires. 

Of course, the answer isn’t always to do nothing. Sometimes arguing fiercely for your position is precisely what’s needed, and sometimes a long stretch of work is the only way through a difficult problem. The point is just that like everything in nature, we heal by doing something and by doing nothing. Hard work and deep rest.

“When you have nothing to say, you may as well keep your mouth shut,” reads one translation of the Tao Te Ching. “The wind and the rain don’t go on forever. If nature knows enough to give it a rest sometimes, so should you.”