Neuroscientists tell us that awareness of beauty in one’s environment for a long time, reduces stress, can have physiological benefits, perhaps even longevity,” he explained. “And I realized that there’s not a day of my life that I didn’t see something beautiful.” He said some days he’s captivated by the way a stream of sunlight hits the wood paneling. Other days, he said, he sits enthralled watching the leaves dance in the wind through the windows. After more than seven decades, he’s convinced. “That’s my explanation. That’s the secret.”
— Vanessa Romo, who interviewed Roland Reisley (101 years old at the time) about his experience living for over 70 years in the “Reisley House, a home in the Usonia Historic District of Pleasantville, NY, designed for him by Frank Lloyd Wright. for over 70 years in 101 years of age who live in his house. (July 16, 2025, NPR Interview)
DK Photo taken at 11:18 a.m. on Nov 29 2024 as the late morning light streamed into our living room. One of those Roland Reisley moments I’ll never forget.
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.
For the past three decades, I have covered the dehumanizing cauldron that is our current politics, and the last decade has been particularly soul-crushing. I begin today a new column dedicated to reclaiming the humanity we are losing to the savagery of politics, the toxicity of social media and the amorality of artificial intelligence. One of the keys to that recovery is nurturing our innate sense of awe, the feeling we get when we contemplate something so vast and mysterious that it quiets our anxieties and ambitions and puts our differences and disagreements into perspective.
