Laziness has become an overused catch-all word for a variety of human traits and behaviors. We talk lazy, using a mishmash of grammar and words we’re not particularly educated on. We talk about ideas we haven’t really thought out. We are too lazy to do chores at times. We are too lazy to work, or work well, at times. In today’s world, the term laziness is all too often used instead of more appropriate descriptive terms for each incident, such as tired, demoralized, afraid, confused, hesitant, despairing, depressed, and dozens of others.

When those conditions are overwhelmingly obvious, those terms are used, but when those conditions are more subtle and less clearly defined, we tend to lump all those symptoms and actions into ‘laziness’. Technically, laziness infers that we are capable of doing something… but we vaguely just don’t feel like doing it. We don’t feel the urge, we can’t seem to summon the energy, we put the thing off repeatedly, or we do it grudgingly, inefficiently, or incompletely.

This enervation (weakening, emptiness) of our nerve power arises in different ways; sometimes it is only during an isolated task, sometimes it covers everything we do, including thinking, talking, working, moving. Sometimes a whole lifestyle seems lazy, and we start referring to someone as lazy, worthless, as a general statement of their being.

But there is no such thing as laziness, it is a term used to cover up a deeper condition. In fact, it is lazy of us (ha ha) to even use the words lazy and laziness, because instead of really looking into what makes a person seem lazy, we simply attribute a whole list of behaviors to this catch-all word laziness. We’re too lazy to figure out why a person is that way, so we lazily call it lazy. Keeps us from having to ‘go deep’, to figure that person out.

Laziness is a derogatory term used to describe an emptiness in will power, nerves, courage, muscle, energy to accomplish something, or accomplish it better. This emptiness exists in each of us to a different degree, according to our lifestyle, experiences, upbringing, beliefs, and most importantly our personal and inner makeup. For anyone who is ‘lazy’, the cause of this emptiness, this de-energizing of your will and nerves, is this:

You have not yet found who you are at your core, and subsequently you have not discovered who you want to be within your outward life, what you want to be doing, in work and in daily activity. From the teenagers who use the current hip slang of their generation rather than speaking more fluently and accurately, to the fat lazy slob the neighbors and co-workers can’t stand, to the person who likes to start new things but never seems to finish them, to the person who finishes things but always seems to do a poor job and cut corners, to a thousand other subtle and overt conditions we term ‘lazy’… it all refers to the exact same thing:

A weakening of your energy, due to not yet finding who and what you truly are, who and what you can truly be. This has no relation to what you’ve always been taught to be, or told you should be, or trained to be. Perhaps, upon searching for who you are and what you want, all that you’ve been trained for and thought you were good at… is not who you are, not what you really want inside.

When you find the universe within you that is unique and right to you, you become a real presence, YOUR presence, a presence that has amazing depths of power and urge to accomplish the right things for you. If you think you are lazy, or call anyone else lazy, you are trivializing something that is missing from a person.

Every lazy person in the world, and every person who exhibits laziness at any time, is an explosion waiting to be found. An explosion of what you are. Most of us will never find that person and remove all vestiges of nerve-emptiness. But it is a universal truth: the more deeply, clearly, truly you find out who you are, the more focused each thought and action becomes, and the more energy you feel throughout your day for each task, from thinking and talking, to chores and life’s work. The more you find of your true self, the more you want to leap up each morning and accomplish your unique, blissful projects and chores.

I know what it’s like to be lazy; I used to not know myself. It took me years to remove those blinders, and the more they are removed, the more my ‘laziness’ is removed. Before my exploration into myself, I used to have to ‘motivate’ myself, find reasons to get things done. During and after that exploration, motivating myself became a useless term; I just wake up and WANT to do my thing. Sometimes I can’t even stay in bed or sit still, there’s an overpowering urge to do the things that are in harmony with my inner wants. It works the same way for everyone.

There is no such thing as laziness. Find yourself, open to your deep purpose, explore what fulfills you, accomplish what brings you inner joy each day, and all emptiness, laziness, is replaced with passion, energy, down to the finest degree.