Learning by Doing Nothing

There is a difference between being a good student and being a good learner. They are not mutually exclusive, but one does not automatically lead to the other. A student is busy, engaged in the "important" activities identified by a teacher or the school or program. A learner is equally busy, engaged in many complex activities, but they are often internal and you not see them.

Learning can be anything from difficult and lonely to exciting and energizing, depending on the task and your perspective. Either way, difficult or exciting, some of the learning time must be spent alone, processing information and figuring out how this new skill or knowledge fits with what you already know. For this reason, time to think about what it is you have just learned and how it fits within your own framework of knowledge is very important. I think we must spend more time doing nothing while we learn. Learning by doing nothing is currently not a popular educational philosophy, but one, I feel, that is significant for integrating and appreciating a certain depth of learning.

My own experience with learning tells me that time alone studying, or familiarizing myself with information and then talking about it with others who have some understating of the topic and materials, is important. And, at this point, I do know something. I have learned. But to take learning to the next level, to make it mine and to be able to use it when I need it or to see that it has application or relevance in other settings, takes more time. Time for doing nothing, nothing but thinking about it on a conscious and unconscious level, is absolutely necessary.

Some of my best "integration" time comes when i am sitting around doing nothing, just thinking. Or, I can be engaged in some mundane and dreary activity, doing laundry, washing a floor, painting a room, making lunches, pulling weeds in the garden, when I have a revelation and see some connection between what I have learned and some other aspect of my life. I can be horseback riding, usually focused on staying on or practicing some particular skill with the horse, and with the intense energy focused on my own survival, I realize later, as i am cooling down or grooming the horse, that I have had some great insight and again something I have learned has taken on new meaning and greater depth.

When one of my children was a seventh grader she came home from school to report herself before her teacher could call and report her. She had gotten in trouble in language arts for not paying attention. When I asked more about what she was doing she said, "Oh, I was just day dreaming." And when I asked for a bit more detail she said she was thinking about time. Apparently she had come from her science class into language arts and still had a few thoughts about what they had been talking about in science. When I asked her what she had decided about time, she responded, "I didn't get very far, I had to read something in the language arts book."

Now perhaps she was just day dreaming and without a doubt she was not paying attention to the teacher, and there is also a strong possibility that she was just fooling around. But, just maybe, she was on the verge of answering some important personal question, or posing some new personal question that would be with her for a while, or maybe she was posing some important question that all of us might benefit from. We will never know because the moment was lost for her. The transition from one subject to the next without time for thought and integration is difficult, more for some than others, but it also leads to a superficial understanding and knowledge of the topic.

So from the time we are small children we are told that daydreaming or doing nothing is not only wrong, but it is wasteful. We are wasting time. We must be engaged in productive activity all the time. Our measure of success is what we produce and this must be tangible. You cannot always see thoughts or the efforts of your thought. And, we often give up for a variety of reasons, before we have fully explored a topic. Rote learning appears to be satisfactory because in the end we do have a product; we can recite something or complete some arbitrary assignment. But the question of what we have learned, what we take form there and how we use it again, or where that knowledge takes us next is not answered. How that learning moves us out of the ordinary and into the extraordinary is not even asked.

Our pragmatism, the need to be productive and to demonstrate our productivity continuously, does not always allow for hanging out and just thinking. Doing nothing, as I like to call it, is actually not nothing at all. It is an action packed internal life that keeps us moving along the path of learning and self knowledge. This time for reflection, done in many ways by different people, allows time for enjoying the fruit of our work and appreciating it on another level.

I have often that that as a student in any given quarter or semester or year, regardless of the discipline, you should study the same topic. That is, look at he same topic from different angles and begin to appreciate the multifacetedness of the topic. You would not need to move from language arts to science as my daughter did, but would study a concept, maybe even time, in everything you did that semester, even language arts and science. Perhaps this could even incorporate some doing nothing time.

The question of what is nothing is critical to this discussion. Nothing may look like no productive activity with no visible outcome, but nothing is really very active and full of potentially explosive things getting ready to bloom in the right conditions. The outcomes of learning by doing nothing don't need to be applicable to everyone, but to the specific learner this nothing has meaning.

There is an element of trust here that may not be obvious. You must trust in the process; trust that learning is a process and that you will begin to understand your own twist on the learning process. You will figure out the best ways of doing nothing for you. Trust that the process is enough of a reward, that you don't always need to have some other end result - there is not need for a product every time. Things really are cumulative and you may not see results for a while. But trust; things are happening under cover, unseen to the naked eye.

I look at gardening as a model for the learning process. Those long winters look like nothing is going on but lots of stuff is happening to allow for spring and all that new and returning growth. While planting and weeding and watering are necessary for growth, the winter and the apparent dormant period are also essential to the vibrancy of the garden. The doing nothing period is the time that precedes the emerge of the garden. That new garden is often just a little bit different: bulbs split and spread, the movement of the seed via the winds and rains and critters allows for different fertilization opportunities, the preparation of the garden for the winter of nothing through mulching and feeding, all affects the new spring garden.

Doing nothing as we learn forces us to move away from the linear mode of thinking and learning. It allows us to free our minds from the clutter of the required and assigned and allows us to think about the what if's and is that so's and the would it be funny if's. It forces us to look at what we want from learning and what we get from learning in other ways. It may not be for everybody, although it is accessible to everyone. We all have the potential to do nothing and learn from it. We just may not choose to take the opportunity or the chance.