What does he remember best? Ah yes – a Sunday morning when he’s trying to have a lie-in, he needs sleep, all the sleep he can get, he’s been out on the fjord all night. He wakes from a dream, his boat is going down, the wheelhouse slowly filling with seawater; he’s at the bottom of the sea, he’s underwater, lying there helpless on his back, his face turned to the surface. Then he’s suddenly wide awake, one ear full of liquid, both girls sitting on top of him. Eli and Guro have brought a bottle of water into the bed; they giggle when they see his reaction. There is no happiness like this, a Sunday morning, with the early sun hanging above the mountains on the other side of the fjord, a light that settles over the bedclothes, over the floor, over his girls. He hears their breath, their laughter.
Post Title & Inspiration: Aldous Huxley: “It’s dark because you are trying too hard. Lightly child, lightly. Learn to do everything lightly. Yes, feel lightly even though you’re feeling deeply. Just lightly let things happen and lightly cope with them.
Are you okay, Dad? she asked. Yes, he said. Will there be someone there to meet you? Yes, Dad, there will. Do you have money on you? Yes, Dad. Got your passport? Yes, Dad. Umbrella? Yes, Dad. Contraception? Yes, Dad. Do you love me? Yes, Dad.
Post Title & Inspiration: Aldous Huxley: “It’s dark because you are trying too hard. Lightly child, lightly. Learn to do everything lightly. Yes, feel lightly even though you’re feeling deeply. Just lightly let things happen and lightly cope with them.
How often have we heard it: Stay busy to make the most of the time we have left. But there’s a lot to be said for doing the opposite…
Several times during the past few months, I have found myself engaged in what has never been one of my strong suits—doing nothing.
The experience of doing nothing crept up on me this summer, surrounded by the stillness and quiet of our family cabin in southwestern Virginia. The hypnotic sound of the Maury River 100 feet away set the stage. Knowing that I wouldn’t be disturbed by friends or family while sitting on the back porch long before the sun came up added to the sensation of being free from interruption before the day began.
Nor was I planning the morning’s activities or concerned about wasting minutes or hours that could be better spent on a project. I wasn’t worried that time was passing; I had instead the unusual sensation that time was standing still.
It reminded me of the poet Carl Sandburg’s famous line: “The fog comes on little cat feet.” Just like you can’t plan for fog, you can’t plan for doing nothing. But you can go to a place where not much happens and feel it slip silently in. The cabin was and is such a place for me. For others, it might be a religious or spiritual space, a blanket on the sand near the ocean, or a favorite chair next to a window.
As a writer and editor, I thrived for years on the need to meet deadlines and on the adrenaline of being praised or promoted for my work. For many people who were focused on their careers, doing nothing was never an option. The answer to “What are you up to?” was always an activity, an event, a new job. As I remember it, no one said, “Nothing.”
It took several years of being fully retired before I could frame this feeling of doing nothing as a new opportunity, an antidote to the expected busyness of retirement: traveling, writing, volunteering, socializing, taking care of grandchildren—all meaningful and done willingly—along with chores and checklists. I was following one of the most important commandments of retirement: Keep busy to stave off feelings of isolation or depression.
Even as I recognized the limitations of that prime directive, I initially felt a vague uneasiness about my appreciation of the virtue of doing nothing. Does it suggest aimless drift? Lack of imagination to come up with activities that make the most of my retirement years? The opposite of doing nothing—doing something—is always present in our lives. But I have come to realize that one doesn’t exclude the other. Rather, they are complementary.
What resonates most for me about doing nothing is the ability to let go of the external and even internal forces that define most of my days; to meditate without intentionally making it an “activity”; to see and hear things more clearly, not worrying about having to pass judgment on any thought that crosses my mind or wondering what follow-up might be necessary. It’s ceding control in a way that I have habitually worked against. It is not a timeout—more of a “time in” to a different way of seeing myself.
Earlier this summer, I read “This Is Happiness,” by Niall Williams, about a fictional Irish community in the mid-20th century where rain is a constant presence in the lives of the town’s poor residents, until it isn’t. “You don’t see rain stop, but you sense it,” he writes at one point. “You hear the quietness you thought was silence get quieter still, and you raise your head so your eyes can make sense of what your ears have already told you, which at first is only: something has changed.”
The quote describes more eloquently than my words how I felt that morning at the cabin when something for me had changed. It was the realization that in experiencing the peace that doing nothing brings, I could acknowledge quietly to myself, “This is happiness.”
Perhaps the desire to take photographs arises from the observation that on the broadest view, from the standpoint of reason, the world is a great disappointment. In its details, however, and caught by surprise, the world always has a stunning clarity.
So Stewart (Brand) gave birth to this idea that if we could show the world from the outside, if we realized what an amazing, extraordinary, unique gift that was — this tiny, little planet teeming with life, swimming around in a dead universe, as far as we know.
We still don’t know that there’s any other life in the universe, which is phenomenal, if you think about it. We still don’t know. We might be the only life in the universe. I think about that nearly every day. I think it’s the most sobering thought. I think that should be shouted from the rooftops every day.
That’s my version of seeing the whole Earth from space — getting people to understand that we might be the only life. It might all be on this one place, and bloody hell, shouldn’t we look after it a bit better, then?
Then those things make me constantly think and constantly be grateful for the fact that I’m alive. I remember reading this comment from a New York taxi driver. He’s driving, and he turns to the customer and says, “Oh, life. I’m so glad I got in.” [Laughs.]
I just love the idea that it’s like an amazing show at a theater and you managed to get a ticket to see it. I appreciate that kind of gratitude.
