Go for a walk in the woods, sure, but do cool indoor stuff as well. But it’s hardly fair for a professional writer to complain about his medium, and we do like to think we’re suitably grateful for its many blessings and charms, so we’re not going to harp on it. All of that is happening online (even the phone calls), and that’s potentially a problem for all the usual reasons. We’re using it to keep doing what we were doing before (e.g., using zoom for virtual meetings), and we’re using it to do different stuff now that the normal stuff is canceled (e.g., finally learning that second language), and I like to think we’re all getting on the phone and talking to each other more often than we used to. Because there’s a problem there: you’re not really sitting there doing nothing, and neither am I. impulsively respond) - Think It Over!”Īnd that’s what we really want to talk about this week, dear reader, as our global pause continues and many of us remain confined to quarters, sitting and doing nothing. I think the phrase needs notation, like music, to let the reader know where the accent goes: Don’t JUST do something (i.e.

You can read that right here, so for now we simply wish to quote Boorstein’s later clarification of her witticism:

It took us a moment to track down the provenance of that memorable phrase and its author (whom we only dimly remembered from a version of Powell’s which no longer exists), and in the process we saw a cartoon and commentary that unpacks it all wonderfully. You can thank American Buddhist teacher Sylvia Boorstein for this week’s title: we lifted it from her popular 1996 book about creating your own mindfulness meditation retreat.

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