We often just blend out the visuals and sounds, but if we slow downs to take them in there is lots of beauty to be found. Looking, truly looking at the world, is a skill that few people regularly practice. Interesting piece by Finish artist Pile Takala: “The Trainee”: Got a job at Deloitte and then just sat around saying she’s thinking. Should choose “standing apart”, taking the view of the outsider without actually leaving. Says we need to distance ourselves from the fast news cycles of social media, built on anger and outrage. Laments that almost always people see rest and retreats as something to make you more productive when you’re back to whatever you were doing, not an end in themselves. Recommends “Deep Listening”: For her in particular, that’s listening to birds, ideally while sitting in her local rose garden. “Longest is the life that contains the largest amount of time-effacing enjoyment.” “We do not tend to see maintenance and care as productive.' Yet we inhabit a culture that privileges novelty and growth over the cyclical and the regenerative.”

“In the context of health and ecology, things that grow unchecked are often considered parasitic or cancerous. It offers repair and a sharpened ability to listen, as well as “an antidote to the rhetoric of growth.” It does contain an active process of listing. coffee or wine.Ĭompares this to learning a foreign language.ĭefines “doing nothing” as refusing productivity and stopping in order to listen. Same when focusing on learning to taste e.g. But after a while you’ll start hearing very clear distinctions. If you pursue something like listening to birds, initially it will be just random noises. “’Nothing’ is neither a luxury nor a waste of time, but rather a necessary part of meaningful thought and speech.” “Already in 1877, Robert Louis Stevenson called busyness a ‘symptom of deficient vitality’.” 1.

Odell how to do nothing