Random Ramblings of a Reluctant Blogger

It is one of those days. The days when I sit doing Nothing.

Nothing isn’t actually Nothing, because, while I sit seemingly idle, my mind is whirling trying to fathom the Universe, my place in it and even more importantly my role in it and whether my doing Nothing is more efficacious than doing something?

Like, often propounded the butterfly effect on things, will my getting up now and moving bring about a tsunami of changes or does nothing happen? Or what shall happen is far too ahead in the future that I cannot lay a finger on it? In that case,  will my  not laying a finger whatsoever make any difference? That  begets another question. Do, to start with, I have the free will to do something, or am I just a small cog  in the larger scale of things. Do I actually set in motion a chain of events or is my being in motion, or otherwise, a part of the chain of events that has already been set in motion?  I cannot figure it out. Perplexity abounds. 

These are the times when I realise vis a vis the Universe what an infinitely insignificant speck of dust I am. Certainly not pleasing to the ego. Then how come one justifies the act of doing something when in fact the doing has just been preordained and that too to result in, ultimately, a nothingness. 

Is doing something, then,  as good as doing Nothing? And if I do, do Nothing, will I cease to be a part of the Universe? Or that which has to got done, be not done or will someone sooner or later do it? In that case does my doing Nothing stop things from getting done? 

I will gladly admit that this existential conundrum is often triggered by a chain of events of which I do not want to be a part of. In this case it was my wife asking me to assist her in her customary spring cleaning mission. Asking, is just a euphemism.

She plonked in front of me a couple of briefcases she had extracted from the recess of time and announced. “Just have a look and clear it.” Now it is this particular action that either sends me on a hyperfast rewind or on an exploration to test the string theory of the Universe. The said cases has receipts, bills and notebooks from Neanderthal ages carefully preserved, or as carefully as possible. 

The act of preserving these receipts is an ode to our bureaucracy. One can never know what will be needed and when. In fact the bureaucracy has perfected the art of doing Nothing  to levels unimagined. They are forever doing something only to do Nothing. 

But such levels,  I can only dream of. Even as I sat pondering whether the half finished notebook, which I proceeded reading, should go into the not-needed bin or to-look-into bin, a tornado swept up. “What are you even going to do with these,” my wife  queried, euphemistically put of-course, even as she emptied all the contents into the not-needed bin.

She wasn’t done yet. Another set of files appeared. “Don’t do anything, just clear it”‘ . It was an order.

To do or not to do, then isn’t the  question. The real question is “if doing something is much the same as doing Nothing.”