Not Niksen

There are four things I need to do today: Take a walk (I always do), go to my Old Lady Exercise Class (my name for it. We are not so much old as older, trying to improve the state of our bones), write this blog, and sand the kitchen ceiling. Just now, when I had the choice between the walk, the ceiling, and the writing, I chose to write. The only problem was, I didn’t know what I might write. I came to my desk with faith that if I picked up a pen something would happen.  

Yesterday, I had trouble getting started too because I felt like I was waiting for something. I’ve felt this way a lot recently. I tell myself it’s because waiting was what we were all doing during Covid, as if waiting had become a habit I hadn’t broken yet. But waiting for what?  

Last night while scrolling through YouTube videos hoping to find something funny to watch, we landed on a video by a young Dutch woman explaining six reasons why the Dutch are always near the top of the World’s Happiest People list. Does anyone else fall for this? Watch a video you think you have zero interest in, but you watch anyway with some vague hope that an important secret will be revealed? I’m not even unhappy, but I am in that funky state of waiting for an unknown something, which I’m guessing is related. So, I watched. Waiting.

One of the six things the Dutch woman said makes Dutch people happier is niksen. I just googled it to make sure I was spelling it right and learned that I’m late to the niksen party. It’s a trend! Apparently, it’s a thing. Perhaps you already know about it? According to Google’s AI Overview (whatever that is!), niksen is “setting aside time to simply be, without any specific goal or activity in mind.” What I want to know is, do I need to put quotation marks around what a Google bot says? I just don’t know.

If I look at my tasks for today, I wonder if my upcoming walk, camera in hand, is “doing nothing” or if the camera makes it “doing something”? For sure, sanding the ceiling is not niksen. Writing isn’t either, but it’s closer. I suppose if I’ve written something and someone reading it understands what I’ve written, that’s doing something. And I did it!