Dear Subscriber First Name,I’m sitting at my desk in the study, which has temporarily become a guest room. On the bed behind me are a few modest piles of Christmas presents. I can hear the stove slowly warming the house, and Dhammasiri pottering about— feeding the birds, making dough for hard bread. I’ve been meaning to write this newsletter for days. But there have also been… other things on the list: Make curtains for the kitchen cupboards Make spicy roasted nuts Take up the curtains in the guest room Inject the Christmas puddings with more brandy Silicone around the kitchen sink Put up the outdoor Christmas tree Make nut roast and gravy Bake bread — fruit bread, rye, vörtbröd and white sourdough Put up the kitchen shelves …and so on
We invited my brother, his wife, and their three grown children to spend Christmas with us, along with Dhammasiri’s boys, who are a similar age. In doing so, we gave ourselves a very clear deadline to finish the kitchen. It’s not finished — but it’s finished enough. Christmas with nine people for four days is a project in itself, requiring (at last count) four large food shops. First is the Swedish julbord, served on Christmas eve, then the traditional english Christmas dinner the next day. And if that doesn’t sound busy enough, add in the fact that we both love to make almost everything from scratch: the bread, crackers, mince pies and sausage rolls, the candy — even the horseradish sauce. So the newsletter waited. Ironically, I had planned to write to you about some reflections I’ve been having on the power of doing nothing, inspired by a book called The Brain at Rest. Did you know that when you’re focused on a task, your brain can actually be less active than when you’re simply gazing out of the window? Experiments show that when someone is “doing nothing,” all kinds of areas of the brain light up, and even the brain’s metabolism increases. Yet once you start making the Christmas to-do list, it’s as if you turn down the dimmer switch on your brain. The missing item on the to-do list this year has been - do nothing! Things quieten down here after Christmas. We’re planning a week of retreat — a chance to stop doing and see what lights up when the brain is finally at rest. I'll let you know what I discover.
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