Doing "Nothing"

           This week for an assignment in class, we had to do nothing. Yes exactly what I said, stand an a place for at least ten minutes and do absolutely nothing. This sounded so easy to me at first, but the more that I thought about it, the more I realized in our society, we never seem to be doing literally nothing. We are always either listening, or watching, or thinking. I decided to attempt doing nothing at my fencing club. As I stood there, I personally found American culture very apparent. All that my mind kept coming back to was thinking what else I had that day to get down or what time something started or how much of it I needed to do. This showed to me the extent to which American culture value time and always having something to do. In American culture, "time is money", and to stand around doing nothing productive is highly looked down upon. As I also stood there, I seemed to drift into watching the people around me. I would watch the fencers and start to evaluate their moves and what they did that I could do to improve myself, and I would have to quickly remind myself to dismiss these thoughts. This showed me the American culture of individualism. We are always looking to better ourselves in one way or another. This activity really connected to me personally because I was able to see first hand the impact of a society and a culture can have on the life and actions of an individual.