My life is an elaborate hack I have set up to override my innate desire to do absolutely nothing. It’s not that I don’t crave or enjoy new experiences – I very much do. I just dread and will go to pains to avoid the effort it takes to pursue those. My hero’s journey defaults toward my couch.
But, knowing that I only get one life and future-me does not want now-me burning her finite hours on earth into smoke, I make sure I do stuff. Since it takes an up-front effort for me not only to “do stuff” but to push through my default of sitting very still, I think it might appear that I’m working hard. And I am, sort of.
I find that my hard work to overcome laziness often rewards me with opportunities to experience my beloved “nothing”. It’s backwards. It’s also hilariously true.
My most recent example is from Wes’ and my backpacking trip in Death Valley National Park last week. Normally, backpacking feels like an endless series of banal life-tasks made difficult and time consuming: endless unzippering and zippering, unstuffing and re-stuffing, finding water sources followed by filtering, consuming, and expelling the water, over and over again. Yet, it struck me after Wes and I had made it to our first camp that I didn’t have much to do.
We must have a pretty solid system in place between the two of us, because the eight-mile hike to our first site went by surprisingly fast, the tent went up easily, water was close by, and somehow there were still hours of daylight left. I hadn’t brought any reading material, figuring that typically all of the above eats any time I’d have for a book.
I was left to do what I am inherently built for: …nothing.
To be honest, it felt a little daunting. At first, I wondered how long ’til I could start on dinner.
But I got the hang of it. “Nothing” turned into a quick nap on a sleeping pad in the sun; hot drinks sipped on the flat sand against a boulder in the late afternoon while chatting about whatever, and even playing with watercolors – a kind of art-creating that doesn’t feel as much like work as working with acrylics can (I think it’s because I have wholesale license to play, versus canvas-painting which is also a vocation).
Eventually it was time for dinner. After the sun set we stargazed for a bit, and then crawled into the tent. We were asleep by 7:30pm, waking at dawn at 6am.
The next few days out there, a similar pattern repeated: we got to camp surprisingly early, set up easily, and found ourselves with hours still ahead. We lazed and lolled; I made the task of retrieving water to filter from the creek into a 45 minute gawk into the trees and an enjoyable foot wash. We got indulgently long hours of sleep.
Normally after a backpacking trip when I unload and stash my backpack away, I experience a distinct “Bye, Felicia”/good riddance moment. I feel a little sorry for my past-self living out of the various now-crumpled baggies full of travel toothpaste and mishappen snacks with outsized significance as the only food to my name out there; I have a hard time comprehending how I slept every night on that tragic inflated pad.
But this time as I stashed my backpack I felt sad in a different way: for the first time, I had a sensation of wishing I was still moving through a wild, silent (from dings, texts, news, horns) world and focused only on inhabiting that experience in the various ways it requires.
I wonder now if the entire point of my life is painstakingly creating elaborate circumstances where I can, actually, experience “nothing” – where I have walked myself into a remote place so far away that there is little to do but just notice and be; where I run so hard that I must recover; where the most rewarding path through a painting is to find that ephemeral state of “flow” and do my best to inhabit the ease there, even through movement. It’s the same for facilitating: when I am at my best in a meeting, I’m absolutely and utterly present.
All of the above require an inordinate amount of work, and yet when I fully commit, the payoff is placidity; a hovering “in between”: a kind of ephemeral, delightful nothingness.
The payoff is, hilariously, what I’ve struggled so hard to avoid. Could I get “there” – the nothing – without the work? Sadly, I don’t think so: the memories from my couch bleed into one another, whereas the blankness of an outdoor afternoon at camp feels as novel as it does soothing.
I can’t wait to go “back”, wherever that is. And yes, I’ll even put in the work.
