How to do nothing
One of the small joys of quarantine life has been growing my mustache.
It's silly, I know, but together with watching the daffodils in our Brooklyn alleyway break into bloom, the 'stache is one of the few signs that time is, in fact, passing.
Placing our attention on these seeming insignificances is part of what Jenny Odell asks of us in her fabulous book How To Do Nothing.
Odell is an artist and avid birder. Her academic work is shaped by those practices because they've developed her capacities to choicefully spend her attention. Written in the context of a booming tech sector that monetizes our eyeballs through distraction, she writes that today, "Nothing is harder to do than nothing."
But that "doing nothing" isn't just about disengaging from the attention economy, it's "about reengaging with something else." Some of my favorite stories she tells are about conceptual art pieces that help us place our attention on the "something else". For example, Scott Polach’s Applause Encouraged, which happened at Cabrillo National Monument in San Diego in 2015 -
"On a cliff overlooking the sea, forty-five minutes before the sunset, a greeter checked guests in to an area of foldout seats formally cordoned off with red rope. They were ushered to their seats and reminded not to take photos. They watched the sunset, and when it finished, they applauded. Refreshments were served afterward."
Totally genius, right?!
And it isn't just natural beauty that Odell moves our attention to. Mierle Laderman Ukeles' piece Touch Sanitation Performance consisted of the artist spending eleven months shaking hands with, and thanking, New York City’s 8,500 sanitation workers.
Odell describes practicing presence with the natural world around her - visiting her favorite rose garden in Oakland, CA and being visited by two crows (affectionally named Crow and Crowson) on her apartment balcony. Her attention is anchored in a place. She notices the passing of ecological time.
It reminds me of Simone Weil's description of prayer. The great French mystic and activist wrote that "prayer consists of attention." For Weil, "the quality of the attention counts for much in the quality of the prayer." When we give our attention wholeheartedly, to a sunset, flowers blooming, or a mustache, we're growing our capacity to be present to the divine.
We're in a time of reckoning. We're hungry for meaning and new ways to find rhythm. Data earlier this month from colleagues at Springtide revealed that 46% of young people have started a new spiritual practice (prayer, meditation, attending virtual services, reading texts etc) since the COVID-19 lockdown.
Odell's writing and invitation to practice presence is one of the gifts we might discover in this time. So as you venture out for a neighborhood walk, how might you focus your attention?
What patterns can you spot amidst the tree branches? What beauty waits to be discovered in a hidden alleyway? And how many mustaches can you count among the passers-by?
