Wally looks up: “Dad, how about nap time.” He jumps up, tucks in, and drifts off.
I feel his little belly with each inhale and exhale. What a great sleeper. Prior to drifting off, I reflect on the last 48 hours — my 19th year anniversary at this stop, to the day.
My desk has been cleared of the work phone, the headset, the zoom lamp.
I turn on my PC to find Corporate Security has wiped all of my corporate apps and my system access. Just like that, gone!
The hum of 100-200 emails a day, conference calls, zoom calls, phone calls, road trips, presentations, strategy sessions, client meetings, staff meetings, back-and-forth commutes, etc etc etc has gone silent.
19 years. Gemini estimates the production and ingestion of 1 million emails requiring 1/2 Terabyte of storage.
“What’s next?”
“I can’t see you sitting still for long.”
I stare at the screen. My fingers tap on the desk, habitually reaching for the keyboard. No task. No task. No Task. No Task.
“How do you feel?”
Right now? Unsteady.
“So what’s the plan.”
(Try to)
“Sit still and let the world do the moving.” (Stegner)
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.”
The title of “Second Act” itself proves to be underselling what the book has to offer: Mr. Oliver is really assembling a guide to the broader principles that make a strong career. There is an importance to slow and steady progress, to showing up and doing the work. A chapter on aging explores how an important requirement of a successful career is simply to be consistent: to improve, to try new things, and to keep creating output. Similarly, Mr. Oliver demonstrates that fears about the inevitable cognitive decline that comes with getting older are likely overblown and our capacity for innovation and wisdom later in life is undervalued. Achievement, he suggests, “isn’t reliant just on our mental ability staying high but on whether we choose to keep using and adapting the capacity we have.”
At 58, I reflect often on the differences between youth and age. One of the biggest is the margin for error. You have a big, broad one when you’re young, and that applies not just to muscles and midriffs but also to relationships, jobs and more.
You can be sloppy, and the wages are modest. You can be heedless and recover. You can squander an opportunity and still find another (and maybe even another) and make the most of it, having learned from your mistakes. You have time. You have flexibility. Everything is more elastic — your knees, your calves, your skin, your heart.
Don’t get me wrong: Age has its benefits. I much prefer 58 to 28. As I described in my most recent book, “The Beauty of Dusk,” age can bring a perspective and sense of peace that are so elusive in youth, when many of us are too distracted — by self-doubt, by want, by envy, by vanity — to learn the trick of contentment.
But age also compels us to proceed with caution. To take greater care. The flesh-and-blood vessels that we occupy are more fragile. The promises we mean to keep and the plans we intend to execute can be postponed only so much. Time is of the essence. Which is perhaps why we’re graced with the wisdom to see that.
Act III is the one I’m staring down now. I confess to a quiet fear that it will prove anticlimactic. How to top Acts I and II? When I stalk the stage slower and grayer every year? When surely all the juicy plot twists are behind me? And yet, friends, there’s this: The stage at last is ours. The script all ours to write. We do actually, kinda know what we’re doing by Act III. Better, we may still have the energy to get up there and do it. Then there’s the fact that we don’t have much choice about the matter. Act III is the one where it dawns on us that there may not be an infinite number of acts, that we’d best get on with making the most of this one. Which prompts a delightful, nerve-racking question or two: What now? What next?
