Angel Casanova
E110 Seminar in Composition
Prof. Joe Harris
What we are faced with today is a reality crisis. Everyone is caught up in social media and sports media and media in general so much that the attention we give to the real people and real things in our life is limited. Odell hints at this when speaking on the Labor Union movement saying, “we are left with 24 monetizable hours that are sometimes not even restricted to our time zones or our sleep cycles.” (15) While we have the time for leisure and free will, we are brainwashed to always have the urge to do something and be productive. There are many different ideas and concepts that Odell bounces around throughout this first chapter. Overall, she seeks to question what we believe to be productive and how we could change that to benefit us to live a fuller life.
One concept I derived from reading this first chapter was the ability to make something from nothing. Think of this not as creating something new but using what already is and changing the meaning of it, similarly to Odell’s art. While people question the action of doing nothing it is “neither a luxury nor a waste of time” (4), but a path to enlightenment and meaning. Nothing could be described as stepping back from your everyday routine or simply observing the world around you. This could allude to the example Odell gives about the guests sitting down on a cliff to watch the sunset peacefully. Such an act did not require much thought or action, just an observation of the world around them.
However, observation does not have to be just “visual” (7), Odell focuses her argument on more of an auditory standpoint. She references a composer, where she speaks about “deep listening” (7) as a way of not necessarily hearing but giving your full attention to what you are perceiving and make sense out of it. In addition, this deep listening makes you more receptive to the things around you as you pass them. Odell uses her bird watching as an analogy, where she naturally listens to the bird sounds and when she hears them, they register to her “like speech” (8). The more attention you give to something the more you will notice about it. You won’t just acknowledge its existence, but it’s shapes and edges and familiar sounds so much that the slightest change will alarm you because you have invested so much time into it. The same can be said about our lives, where we choose to put it will determine the amount of control we have on our lives.
This desire to always do something and be productive can control our lives. The amount of time we put into work, social media, and friends proves we try to fulfill the time we have in a day. Odell calls this the “attention economy” (22). Time in our society today has become more of an “economic resource’ (15) rather than our free will. We associate productivity with a return on investment unintentionally. I’m sure you’ve heard of the saying “time is money”, I heard it many times from my coaches growing up. They stressed the importance of gaining skill and that wasting that time doing nothing was a bad thing. However, Odell proposes we should practice this nothingness in hopes it gives us a sense of what is essentially real. She lists three things we can benefit from doing nothing as “an antidote to the rhetoric growth” (25). One of these is our connectivity, more specifically our ability to empathize. We do mostly everything online and most of our communication is online. Because of this we don’t receive the 90% of communication that’s nonverbal which hinders our ability to empathize. This limits the amount of human connection we can make in the real world.
As quoted, “I began to think of this as an activist book disguised as a self-help book.” (xxii) I think Odell wants us to use this book as a call to action. She wants us to be more aware not only of our existence in this world but how it affects the “cultural and ecological devastation” (xxii) surrounding us. By doing nothing we are taking a step back from our daily lives and becoming more aware of how our actions contribute to this devastation. Consequently, we can change our perspective on things that will affect our actions and behaviors. Not only does this help the individual, but it can also help the masses. Sort of like a virus (in a good way) that spreads among our environment and could possibly spark a movement.