What Would You Do If You Had Nothing to Do?

What would you do if you had nothing to do? This question was asked on the zenhabits blog.

This is an exercise for designing a meaningful life. I want to tweak it a little and ask:

What would your kids learn about if they had nobody telling them what they are supposed to learn?

That, in essence, is the base for where to start helping our kids design their lives.

So many of us get caught up in all the things we think we’re supposed to do. And then we hand that off to our children. How about we break the cycle, and teach them how to recognize the really important things? How to know what their lives are about, and who they are?

Who are you? You can answer that question by answering the question of what you would do if you had nothing to do. If you had an entire day, and entire week, and entire month, where you had no obligations, no shoulds, nothing but time. What would you do? If you have no idea, you have lost yourself.

Do we want our kids to lose themselves? Do we want our kids to not know what to do when they have only themselves and nothing to do? Or do we want to teach them what we learned, to base who we are on all of our have-tos? To rely on others to tell us what we need in order to succeed, and to be human?

First, as parents, we need to recognize who we are, and what is important in our own lives. What we believe in, what we are passionate about irregardless of the rest of the world’s demands on us. Then, we can remember what it’s like to be a child.

It’s important to ask ourselves if our kids have a lot of time to just be? And if the answer is yes, do they fill it with things they love to do and are passionate about, or do they fill it with escapist activities? Do our kids know who they are? Do they know what they would do with their day if they had nothing to do? Do we?

What would you do with your day if you had nothing to do? What about your kids? And who gets to decide if what we would fill our day with is “worthy” or “good enough”?

Do you spend a significant amount of your life doing the things you want to do? If not, why not? If our kids aren’t, why aren’t they?

These kinds of questions are good to ask ourselves regularly. It helps us refocus and become more fully human – fully us.