“Who are you without the doing?”

That was a meditation and challenge from the Hurry Slowly podcast by Jocelyn K. Glei. I’ve been thinking about that on and off since I heard her say it more than a year ago. I’m accomplishment-driven. I have crazy amounts of discipline. That means I do a lot. I excel at work, I keep up with my 3 year old, I make stuff for fun, I write.

But what am I when I’m a human being, instead of a human doing?

I don’t know.

But I felt it today. At the beach. I sat facing the ocean, watching the waves and the birds scuttling by. And I was being. No semblance of doing, no desire to do anything in particular other than sit, watch, and listen. The waves crashed in a successive pattern. The seagulls and tiny running birds eyed me and went about their business. I was present without the need for accomplishment to validate my existence.

Those birds didn’t care if I excel at work. The waves don’t value my achievements. Nature does not give a shit about me and my life. Maybe that’s the key. Spending more time with nature to realize my place in it. To understand that people are so wrapped up in themselves that they don’t notice who I am or care about what I do. What I do can matter to me, but who I am matters to my family, my friends, to the ones I care about.

I hope by writing this down it will remind me to get to nature more often to feel the being, especially if I get too wrapped up in the doing. I’m doing enough. I do enough. (I actually do too much but I can’t help it.) but maybe with reminders, I can rein myself in and do just enough and spend the rest of the time being.

I’d like that.