THE COMPLEX ART OF BEING BELA PADILLA (CONCLUSION)
BY ALLAN P. HERNANDEZ
PHOTOGRAPHY BY SHAIRA LUNA
Mar.11.19
When you say someone is beautiful inside and out, what does it mean exactly? Have you had the privilege of knowing one such someone? We can’t say for sure, but in the time we spent knowing Bela Padilla, we think we have…
Part 3
The Queen Of Doing Nothing
“If I’m not working, my day is filled with useless things. I don’t do anything. But I pretend to wake up early to make it look like I’m going to do something.”
That, friends, is a life skill we should all be learning—putting meaning into doing nothing. Bela already has it down to an art. The way she does it is she treats doing nothing as though it were a form of meditation or ritual—she accepts she’s doing nothing, embraces it, and then goes about her activity of doing nothing, which amounts to actually doing something. Confusing, isn’t it? We’ll let Bela explain further.
“So I wake up at 8 a.m. I would then probably walk to a room and then realize there's nothing I need to do there. I then go back to my bed then sleep til 12 noon so the truth is I wake up at 12. And the rest of my day consists of doing errands. I’m making so many errands, but really I’m doing nothing.”