It's been three months since I was let go from my job of over six years. I had long planned to leave, but I never got to actually resign. I was, in effect, pushed out. But since I'd been planning to leave, I set myself up nicely for the fall. When people asked me what I was going to do (before the fall), I always had some kind of answer that seemed worthy of not making money anymore.

I was going to write, be an artist, bohemian, musician, try to do something that would mean something (and, if I was lucky, find somehow in that something to make some money). In my most truthful moments of answering this question, however, I would say "nothing" with a smile. The smile, because it implied I was joking. It's easier for people to take if your goal is only jokingly nothing.

In the last couple of weeks, I have embraced the nothingness. I have admitted to anyone who asks that, yes, I am truly doing nothing. And while I still smile when I say this (because it's amusing), I'm not joking. I have officially become a character on Seinfeld.

It's a mixture of George, Jerry and Kramer. I'm not sure if there's much Elaine in my nothingness, but maybe I'm just not seeing it (she was, of course, always employed and very much a busy body).

There is an art to doing nothing. But, as in any religion or creed or belief, you have to accept the nothingness. You cannot use it as a fall back position. Then it's not nothing, it's an excuse. And I'm not trying to excuse my nothingness.

It has been a struggle to make it to this point. I talked about creating a new routine, and slowly incorporating my artistic dealings into this routine. But all this talk about the routine is really trying to reign in nothingness. To put a form into it. And that is very much like the office life I lived for almost ten years (two jobs between late 1996 and early 2006). I was ruled by deadlines. Working at a newspaper, I had two deadlines daily. Working as a researcher, I had deadlines every week or so. Regimented in how to accomplish everything. And my head was stuck in this need for order.

I am not totally free of this state of mind, but I am drifting away from it.

And I wonder if my inability to incorporate routine into freethinking (which has given way to my acceptance of this philosophy of nothingness) has to do with the form of routine itself. Putting a jail sentence on creativity is killing exactly what I have been trying to give birth to.

So I have abandoned a certain routine solely for the sake of discipline.

Time is the denominator of the nothingness and the routine. Time runs no matter how you cross-section it. You can split it up into fifty different chunks, and time keeps going whether or not you fill the chunks. I can say there have only been a few times where I stood around wondering, "What am I going to do now?"

I have not, in other words, had many lapses of faith in the nothingness.

When you are working at a job, not only are the hours at the job cut into chunks, but the rest of your day is, too. You have to get everything that isn't job-related done in the hours outside of work. And, somewhere, you have to get a little sleep so you can get up and do it all over again. Working people are constantly running out of time.

And while, as a non-working person, I have all the time in the world, I can't give any of it to anyone else. I cannot relieve the working-person's burden of not enough time by giving them a couple of extra hours. So there is a bit of resentment in my doing nothing (not to be mean or judgmental to the working people, but I can see it in your eyes). I am wasting time, you see. Time I will never get back.

But isn't this me getting the time back, right now? Didn't I decide the working aspect of my day was, essentially, not worth my time? Well, then by not doing the work part, aren't I actually gaining time?

Which leads us back to using that time. Because, as I have said, I have done nothing in the last three months of any consequence. So I could say "nothing productive." But by adding "productive," I am putting all this time into the jail cell of "work."

And it certainly isn't work to do nothing. It's not my job to do nothing. But, in my life right now, nothing is the greatest accomplishment I can claim.

Matt Worley isn't doing much of anything today.