A Body Restless in Idleness

When you work in medicine, you inevitably develop the habit of viewing things through the lens of whether they will "heal" or "improve."
This is natural for the profession and is also a necessary attitude.
Because treatment is, fundamentally, an endeavor expected to bring about positive change.

That is a natural and necessary attitude for the profession.
Treatment is, fundamentally, an endeavor expected to bring about positive change.

However, if you apply that same lens to life itself, living immediately becomes something to be "evaluated."
Did it have meaning?
Did it create value?

Did it move forward?
Time in which nothing happens is quickly labeled as "idleness."

"Even if I cannot feel meaning or value, it is enough just to exist."

Even if I think that way in my head,
when I actually sit still, my body starts to feel restless.
I feel unsettled. If I am not doing something, I become anxious.

This is not laziness.
I believe it is a physical reaction of a human who has long adapted to a world that measures oneself by value and achievement.

Medicine is built upon a system of values: healing, improving, and causing change.
When you spend a long time in that environment, your body becomes the first thing that can no longer endure time in which nothing happens.

But in life, there is time that does not heal, days that do not change, and time where nothing happens, yet it certainly continues.
When you can only perceive such time as failure or stagnation,
life becomes very suffocating.

I sometimes think that there might actually be a meaning that transcends human wisdom.

It is not a meaning that can be explained.
It is not something that is recovered the moment you understand it.
Rather, it is something that continues to refuse our attempts to assign meaning to it.
It is like a margin that remains without being recovered, while still not being understood.

Time when you cannot feel meaning, and days when you cannot realize value,
remain quietly as a depth that cannot be fully explained when looking back later.

Is there not also an aspect to living that, before achieving anything, is simply "to continue to exist without being erased"?

My body feels restless in idleness.

I think that is a very natural reaction for a human who has become too accustomed to a world of value when they encounter a different way of living.
Therefore, I feel that time in which we cannot feel meaning or value does not necessarily need to be immediately denied.