This has been a summer of a great deal of outer activity.
We renovated a hundred year old home. We moved into said home, with all of the agony that moving involves. We traveled to Costa Rica as a family. We barely tolerated one of the hottest summers in our memories. We prepared (are preparing) for the youngest to start school.
Perhaps some people’s intellectual life is stimulated by outer activity. I find that my temperament (to my frequent consternation) requires quite a bit of inactivity in order to make space for rich internal activity.
I often think of this quote from the film Bright Star. The film is about the romantic relationship between John Keats and Fanny Brawne, but I remember very little about the film except for this quote by the character Charles Brown:
If Mr. Keats and myself are strolling in a meadow, lounging on a sofa or staring into a wall, do not presume we're not working. Doing nothing is the musing of the poet.
It was funny at the time, and still is now, in a grim sort of way. But it’s also true. Pain, love, beauty, this all may be the substance of the poet. But staring at a wall or walking through a meadow or lounging on a sofa are all necessary parts of the writing process. Unfortunately, they also look like a complete lack of work ethic and productivity, two things highly prized by the society in which we live and work and find meaning.
If I could bring about any sudden change to life, I think it would be to provide a little more breathing room. Somewhere between the pressures of school and work, the tyranny of social engagements, little league, and ballet classes, there would be room to breathe — room for staring at the stars, room for long conversations, and room for thought.
I can’t suddenly strip away all of the external activities of my life, though I can constantly be about the work of purging them. But I can use my elbows and wrestle out a little breathing room from time to time. One of the surprising ways I’ve done this is through poetry. Not in writing it (though the one leads often to the other), but in reading it. There is something about the pace of poetry and what it demands of us that opens up a little room. It demands our attention. It makes us ponder both the small and large. It opens up our imagination to a capaciousness the relentless world overlooks. This is why the world makes little space for poetry and why it so desperately needs poetry.
So, if you haven’t done so, and even if you don’t like or understand poetry (perhaps especially so), make a little space for poetry. You might find that the nothing it seems you are doing, opens up a thousands somethings that are infinitely more valuable than mere productivity.
For practice, here’s a lovely little poem by Barbara Kingsolver called “How to Do Absolutely Nothing.”
Rent a house near the beach, or a cabin
but: Do not take your walking shoes.
Don’t take any clothes you’d wear
anyplace anyone would see you.
Don’t take your rechargeables.
Take Scrabble if you have to,
but not a dictionary and no
pencils for keeping score.
Don’t take a cookbook
or anything to cook.
A fishing pole, ok
but not the line,
hook, sinker,
leave it all.
Find out
what’s
left.