In our busy age of achievement and relentless pursuit, the very idea that not-doing can be perceived as a blessing sounds seditious. And yet it is inaction that is sometimes necessary for further development.
“Who does not know those hopeless for the truth and often cruel people who are so busy that they always have no time …” I met this exclamation from Leo Tolstoy in the essay “Not Doing”. He looked into the water. Today, nine out of ten fit into this category: there is not enough time for anything, eternal time trouble, and in a dream care does not let go.
Explain: time is. Well, time, as we see, was like that a century and a half ago. They say we don’t know how to plan our day. But even the most pragmatic of us get into time trouble. However, Tolstoy defines such people: hopeless for the truth, cruel.
It would seem, what is the connection? The writer was sure that it is not people with a heightened sense of duty, as is commonly believed, who are eternally busy, but, on the contrary, unconscious and lost personalities. They live without meaning, automatically, they put inspiration into goals invented by someone, as if a chess player believed that at the board he decides not only his own fate, but also the fate of the world. They treat life partners as if they were chess pieces, because they are only concerned with the thought of winning in this combination.
A person needs to stop… wake up, come to his senses, look back at himself and the world and ask himself: what am I doing? why?
This narrowness is partly born of the belief that work is our main virtue and meaning. This confidence began with Darwin’s assertion, memorized back in school, that labor created man. Today it is known that this is a delusion, but for socialism, and not only for it, such an understanding of labor was useful, and in the minds it was established as an indisputable truth.
In fact, it’s bad if labor is only a consequence of need. It is normal when it serves as an extension of duty. Work is beautiful as a vocation and creativity: then it cannot be the subject of complaints and mental illness, but it is not extolled as a virtue.
Tolstoy is struck by «that amazing opinion that labor is something like a virtue… After all, only an ant in a fable, as a creature devoid of reason and striving for good, could think that labor is a virtue, and could be proud of it.»
And in a person, in order to change his feelings and actions, which explain many of his misfortunes, “a change of thought must first occur. In order for a change of thought to occur, a person needs to stop … wake up, come to his senses, look back at himself and the world and ask himself: what am I doing? why?»
Tolstoy does not praise idleness. He knew a lot about work, saw its value. The Yasnaya Polyana landowner ran a large farm, loved peasant work: he sowed, plowed, and mowed. Read in several languages, studied natural sciences. I fought in my youth. Organized a school. Participated in the census. Every day he received visitors from all over the world, not to mention the Tolstoyans who bothered him. And at the same time, he wrote, like a man possessed, what all mankind has been reading for more than a hundred years. Two volumes a year!
And yet it is to him that the essay «Not-Doing» belongs. I think the old man is worth listening to.