A Habit of Nothing

I've been practicing a new hobby lately. It's not a creative craft, nor is it a newfound sport or athletic endeavor. It's not a niche interest in arthouse cinema, or a novel interest in woodworking. It has no guidelines or necessary equipment or associated interest groups. In fact, it's nothing at all. Yep, I've been making a habit of doing nothing.

Nothingness, stillness, and the seemingly disconcerting boredom that often accompanies them, I've realized, are elements of life oftentimes only experienced intermittently and transiently. Our fraternalization with the quiet, lucid, tranquil parts of life is not usually a deliberate one, but rather a passive participation in all the random times the life's frenzy suddenly quiets itself in front of us, as if the to-do lists and thought trains and chores and entropic volatility of our daily routines comes to a screeching halt for a brief moment.

You feel it in the placid, bracing nighttime air as you drag your trash cans down to the curb on a Tuesday evening before getting ready for bed, pulling creaking and groaning polyethylene plastic, as it bounces and reverberates with a thunderous THUD, PFFF, THUD while you descend your driveway, having put off this weeknight chore until it suddenly pulled you from your peaceful rest on the couch — the remembrance of the task going off like a sudden, tonal, droning alarm in your head, and as if the stinky, heavy refuse you have in tow behind you has decided to play a melody of percussion to the empty neighborhood streets that sit washed out in flickering, incandescent yellow lights, playing the part of a patient and eager audience. For this is your impromptu symphony, and you play the part of a weary, begrudged Tuesday night conductor to the quiescent, attentive suburban odeum that surrounds you, only perturbed by the banging of your trash cans and the uninterrupted internal monologue of your thoughts.

You recognize stillness amongst the mechanical droning of an airplane cabin many hours into a flight, as you uncomfortably squirm, struggle, and re-adjust in your seat in 32B, feeling a tensile pulse that sends a sharp, burning current down through your thighs and calves, undoubtedly caused by the infinitesimally and oxymoronically small, expensive bastille you paid $300 for that you now find yourself sitting in, while you sip on a watered-down, yet surprisingly refreshing, ginger ale. As the plane rhythmically skips and bounces through currents of air in a turbulent, yet lulling movement, you're ever so careful not to spill it on the old woman sleeping next to you in 32C, herself having fallen asleep watching "50 First Dates" on the dim, slightly scratched LCD screen on the seat back in front of her. You carefully orient appendage and sinew in a delicate and deliberate dance while you re-position as you make sure not to breach the invisible barrier that separates you from the sleeping neighbor to your right, and the 6'4" soft-spoken colossus of a man to your left in 32A as he taps on his iPad, continually losing and restarting a game of solitaire — a Sisyphean, yet understandable undertaking. In this moment, you're paradoxically alone and still, separated from the tightly-packed world around you, save for a few accidental arm bumps and knee taps here and there.

Quietness arrives with the ethereal breeze of frigid October air hitting your face as you unzip the door of your tent on an early fall morning of camping, letting the brisk mountain wind, carrying with it pine and lichen and soil, flood over your already-cold, yet somehow pungent and sweaty corpus, having been squeezed and soaked by layer upon layer of wool, neoprene, and cloth that grip your joints and limbs, each one aching with dull pressure, having contended with the frigid ground all night, albeit for the hand-me-down torn, half-deflated sleeping pad that made a futile attempt to hoist you from the frozen earth below. In this moment, everything seemingly comes to a stasis. An immense comity intertwines the sounds of rustling sequoias, rigid cold metal tent zippers, and hard, crunching dirt beneath your feet. The world seemingly comes to a standstill, the only urgency of the moment being that of starting your morning campfire so that you can invigorate your body with the warming sensation of scalding, grainy instant coffee and piquant pinon smoke, that will inevitably cling to your body for the rest of the day, a scent that you wear with pride as if it was an expensive bottle of La Labo Santal 33.

Nothingness arrives to us without plan or warning. It comes in the five eternal minutes as you pace through looming and imposing walls of faux fur coats and cheap accessories in a Nordstrom Rack while you wait for your girlfriend to try clothes on in the dressing room, in what has seemingly turned into an Odyssean task. You experience it in the awkward shuffle amidst a crowded entryway in a restaurant as you wait for your table, even your own breathing drowned out by the din of clinking glasses and chatter of conversation and happy birthdays and first dates. It embraces you through the mechanical whir of your fan as you lay still in bed at night, drifting in and out of consciousness to its whining, rhythmic hum.

Even though these moments are, at surface value, dull, fleeting, and perhaps even annoying at times, I've come to realize that they are one of the greatest gifts our days incur. Removing intention — save for the sake of intentional stillness, voiding yourself of action and deliberation, and delivering your mind wholly to ephemeral, unstructured thought are some of the rarest opportunities we're afforded, delivered sparingly and seldomly.

Instead of welcoming these moments as they come to us as rare gifts, they often become a burden: a heaviness and discomfort, an itch that crawls under your skin and immerses itself under every nerve ending. The four perpetual minutes as you slowly move through the only open line at the grocery store pulls a hot, leaden strain into your neck and shoulders that you can't ignore, harried by the restless toddler in front of you yelling at his mother and the patron at the front of the line, whose inability to find her credit card amongst her purse has now imposed a tragic transgression onto your errands that you can't seem to ignore. You dread the all-too-familiar mechanical, unremitting gridlock of your evening commute as traffic slowly winds down to a crawl past highway exit 46, as if the torpid movement of traffic and bright afternoon glare that pierces your passenger side window has somehow confined you in a stockade of your own design.

So, we numb it. Our phones, distractions, food, drugs — anything to paradoxically "quiet" the noise of our already-quiet, uninterrupted internal state. We shun and deject nothingness, quietness, and stillness, out of some unfounded, primal disdain for their inevitable existence, because stimulus and distraction have somehow become our new safe havens.

That's why doing nothing has become my most powerful habit as of late. Not the kind of "watch paint dry" nothing. It's the nothing that means turning all my screens off after a long day at work and seeing how my mind and body fill in the empty space. It's walking in the door and abruptly chasing my dogs around the backyard in a chaotic convergence of panting and barking and jumping. Or, it's pulling out my cheap, crusted, sticky oil paints and brushes, and attempting to paint a picture I took of the sunset while I listen to old Freddie Gibbs albums on a little Bluetooth speaker, more focused on the feeling of bristle against canvas than the resulting media. It's going for a run without headphones — instead choosing to listen to the cacophony of humming cars from a distance, mixed with the loud chirps of summertime crickets vibrating the grass around my feet, as the humid southern California air overpowers my senses with the smells of blooming eucalyptus and salty marine mist.

This probably comes off as, but truthfully is not, some hippie-dippy, self-help pedestal that I'm trying to preach from, but I promise it is not. Rather, it is the intentional immersion into stasis: the uncomfortable, yet ever-revealing presence and acknowledgement of stillness, and the invaluable gift of nothing. It's the removal and stripping of arbitrary systems, structures, and tools, to expose the difficult, yet beautiful raw aspect that lies underneath. It's exacting, unrelenting, and unintuitive, and surprisingly much more difficult than any race I've trained for, or language I've studied, or project I've completed.

Nothingness is a practice of endurance and focus, I've found. It demands intentionality, the conscious act of eliminating distraction and stimulation. It's revealing, elucidating your internal ethos as if it was talking to you through a loudspeaker, without filter or censorship. In this regard, it elicits stoicism. It begets mindfulness. It dissolves the training wheels we work so hard to arbitrarily attach to our lives to ease the unfiltered and sometimes frightening baseline upon which we derive our sense of selves.

So again, not in an air of pompousness, self-help, or meditative superiority, I've dedicated myself to giving into nothing. To opening myself to raw emotion, thought, and experience. And this hobby, which is intrinsically simultaneously free, difficult, and boring, has been my favorite one yet.

Here's to the best habit I could engender upon myself — being no habit at all.

— J