There is an Indian fable that illustrates the importance of doing nothing.
The driver of a fine coach is being pulled by six horses. Inside the carriage sits someone he has never met.
“Stop the carriage,” the voice inside says quietly.
The driver ignores the voice and urges the horses to go faster.
“Stop the carriage,” the voice repeats.
This time, the driver is annoyed that anyone should tell him what to do with his own coach. He whips the horses harder.
“Stop the carriage,” the voice says a third time.
The driver raises his whip — but then he pauses. A thought occurs to him. Without a word, he brings the carriage to a halt. He has suddenly realised that the rider inside is the true owner of the coach.
The fable is about the ego, which drives the mind, pulled by the five senses and thoughts. The ego assumes it owns the coach and horses — until a voice in silence tells it to stop. The ego resents this and reacts by goading the senses and mind into even more frenzied activity.
But one day, the ego realises it has made a mistake. The voice within is the Self, the true possessor of the ego, senses, and mind. Once the Self makes itself known, the ego can relax and surrender its false sense of control.
The way modern life is set up leaves many people feeling restless and distracted. We are dealing with side effects such as shortened attention spans, insomnia, and the kind of racing anxiety typical of an overstimulated brain.
As a society, we pay lip service to the importance of quiet time — particularly time spent in meditation — but the hidden wisdom of doing absolutely nothing is often overlooked. “Doing nothing” sounds passive, but a special kind of doing nothing, often referred to as nondoing, can be deeply transformative.
Nondoing isn’t an add-on, like a yoga class, or simply a break from everyday busyness. It isn’t passive. Instead, it’s a state of wakeful alertness — a return to your own being. Nondoing, in a word, connects you to your deeper self.
Nondoing seeks to reveal a key insight: that the ego, mind, and five senses are not in control. Their constant activity rests upon the silent Self within us all. Translating the fable into daily life isn’t necessarily easy — most of us have spent years relying on the opposite of nondoing. But a simple clue helps:
Before the carriage can stop, it can slow down — then slow even more — until it reaches nondoing by stages.
Think of your mental state right now. You’re balancing two tendencies. One side leans toward action, distraction, stimulation, desire, and constant motion. The other leans toward quiet, calm, reflection, and simply being.
Everyone contains both sides, but modern life tends to push the scales heavily in favour of the first. If you neglect the second, your default state becomes overloaded. The signs are already familiar — people who throw everything into their work, skip downtime, and experience fatigue that even sleep can’t resolve.
Nondoing doesn’t have to come as a sudden epiphany. You can begin gently, by gradually stepping away from overload. However you define it, downtime or inner time is necessary every day — along with a commitment to the value of nondoing, which is not especially supported by the world around us. Social forces overwhelmingly push us in the opposite direction.
You could start with a small motivational exercise: sit in a quiet place, free from distractions, with your phone turned off. Sit and do nothing for five minutes — don’t look at the time, just estimate. In several studies, even this short pause was difficult for participants to tolerate without becoming impatient, restless, annoyed, or anxious.
The real turning point doesn’t come when you’re able to sit still for 10 or 15 minutes. It comes when you begin to enjoy and appreciate those minutes. That’s when the voice of nondoing has started to reach you.
Whether in modern times or ancient ones, that’s a breakthrough everyone deserves to experience.