Being and Nothingness

What would happen if you just didn't?

A few weeks ago I checked Jenny Odell’s How to Do Nothing out of the library, and while I have yet to finish it I can report I have already internalized its anti-productivity message. I had surgery on November 1, and since then I have been doing nothing.

As recommended by my surgeon, I took two weeks off of work to allow myself time to recover and I have not used any of this down time to get a head start on my taxes, apply for the grant I’ve been putting off since June, do my 7-minute abs, reboot my efforts to learn Spanish, organize my closet, bake a pie, read that long-overdue manuscript, clip the cats’ toenails, start planning for holiday gifts, write this newsletter, or do anything at all useful. 

OK, to be honest, I did sit on the stairs while my sisters cleaned the junk off the back porch, directing traffic: keep this; pitch that. But they were the ones doing the actual labor. (I love you sisters!)

Other than that, here’s what else I have done: I have slept, luxuriously late at times. I have read a little over half of Invisible Child, and I have watched multiple episodes of Andor, The Peripheral, Interview with the Vampire, and The Crown. I have slowly rediscovered, bite by bite, the pleasures of food with flavor. I have hobbled down a trail in the woods on the arm of my husband. I have sat curled in a blanket and watched the play of sunlight on the walls of the living room in the morning. I have rubbed Aquaphor on the scars on my breasts and contemplated their maiming. I have eaten ice cream in bed with two of my elsewise wounded friends. I have marveled at the beauty of my cats. I have bought perfume samples and cheap cashmere sweaters online. I have played ping-pong. I have had acupuncture. I have drunk wine! And I have hidden myself away from the world, embarrassed by my baldness, my helplessness, my uselessness.

After my sisters had left but before my mother arrived, I allowed myself a little breakdown. At that point the flurry of activity around the surgery had died down and the adrenaline had worn off. This moment, I hear, is when it is common for the post-traumatic stress response to materialize. The worst part is over. For the first time in five months I feel as though I am actively healing rather than simply enduring, and this is a powerful change of pitch. But the structures by which I have organized the recent past – the suffering of chemo, the obliteration of cancer – are gone as well and so I find myself at a loss. What happens next? And, how long can I get away with doing nothing?

Because I like it. The nothingness, that is. As I’ve written elsewhere, for most of my adult life I’ve been a compulsive doer. Even under the constraints of covid I was on the hustle. When I was still freelancing I had three jobs, or four, and a rich web of social ties and obligations, and they defined me. Even now, with a stable job, I sweat it: if I am not producing, helping, being useful, who am I? But now, here’s this medically sanctioned hibernation giving me permission to  just … stop, and I’m not that keen to start back up again.

In her book, Odell makes the case for recasting #FOMO as #NOMO: the necessity of missing out. To miss out, she posits, is a form of self-care, but not in the commodified, goop-y sense by which it has been debased. Rather, she writes: 

“I think that ‘doing nothing’ – in the sense of refusing productivity and stopping to listen – entails an active process of listening that seeks out the effects of racial, environmental, and economic injustice and brings about real change. I consider ‘doing nothing’ both as a kind of deprogramming device and as sustenance for those feeling too disassembled to act meaningfully.”

It feels grandiose right now to imagine my current inactivity as an incubator for positive change, but I’d like to think it possible down the road. I certainly feel disassembled, the pieces held together only by a surgical bra and a walking boot. But I have taken the challenge to stop and listen to heart. 

In the weeks when I was prepping for, having, and then recovering from surgery, a crisis enveloped an institution and people I have long been close to. I don’t want to get into the particulars – though people in Chicago probably know what I’m talking about – but the crisis has been public, messy, and painful for many. It was hard to stay on top of the twists and turns of it all, spooling out as they were at the speed of social media, and that it all happened while I was otherwise preoccupied meant I didn’t have to. Instead, I tried to liberate myself from the idea that this crisis could be easily fixed, or that it could be understood if only I, or others, knew the “truth.” Instead, I just listened.

In the same chapter in which Odell talks about #NOMO, she references composer Pauline Oliveros and acoustic ecologist Gordon Hempton, each of whom have made listening fundamental to their art practice. Oliveros’s Deep Listening technique encourages the listener to listen “in every possible way to everything possible … to give attention to what is perceived both acoustically and psychologically.” The goal and the reward of this practice of listening not just to what is perceptible but also to how it makes you feel, writes Odell, is “a heightened sense of receptivity and a reversal of our usual cultural training, which teaches us to quickly analyze and judge more than to simply observe.” 

As Hempton, whose “One Square Inch of Silence” is a glorious attempt to preserve and honor the natural soundscape of the Olympic Peninsula’s Hoh rainforest, puts it, “Silence is not the absence of something but the presence of everything.” Holding yourself still enough to listen to everything, posits Odell, fosters empathy, and sharpens our ability to make sense of an overwhelming abundance of inputs.

I had started simply listening to the competing voices of the crisis – the angry ones, the hurt ones, the conciliatory, saddened, confused ones – because I was too out of it to keep up, but when I read this passage in How to Do Nothing I started to think listening to everything could offer a path toward healing this jagged wound. Maybe even, down the road, make some change.

This is actually as far as I’ve read in Odell’s manifesto, so I’ll stop trying to hopelessly summarize a book I’ve yet to finish. And, for the record, I wrote most of this before I went back to work today, so by the time you are reading this I will have rejoined the world of the productive, at least as much as it will have me. But between the remaining chapters of HTDN and Tricia Hersey’s Rest is Resistance, which I just ordered, there may well be more to come. 

Or maybe not! Maybe I will read these books and choose to do nothing useful with them! That would be appropriate too, I think.

---

PS: On a physical level, for the curious out there, I am doing well. I have a seroma in my left breast, which has required a round of drainage (soooo gross), and may require more, and I have to wear the ankle boot for another seven days – but other than that, things are looking up. On Monday, in addition to seeing the orthopedist, I also go meet the radiation oncologist and get set up for that next round of torture, but I’m told that compared to chemo radiation is a walk in the park. By the time I’m in that phase, next month, I may actually be able to go for a walk in the park as well.