It takes hard work to do nothing—truly nothing. And it’s not just the effort of concentration and attention involved in staying still, but all that precedes the act: the years of training and preparation, the self-discipline you need to master, the path of askesis—the “labor on the self”—on which you must embark. When Oscar Wilde quipped that to “do nothing at all is the most difficult thing in the world, the most difficult and the most intellectual,” he placed, as was his habit, considerable seriousness behind the joke.
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