Writing 4: Forwarding or Countering Odell

Nicole Schlesinger

The idea of “forwarding” an idea, furthering it, deepening it, and somehow making it your own, as described in Rewriting, is personally relevant when applying it to Odell’s book.  I think an important part of any reading is to digest the writer’s project and see if it makes sense when considering one’s own life.  In the case of How to Do Nothing, this makes perfect sense. 

I grew up in an affluent suburb of New York City that often seemed to value achievement over almost everything.  While I realize how fortunate I am to have had a good education, excellent teachers, and a concerned and supportive community, too many adults and young people were obsessed with being busy, being involved in a million activities all supposedly for self-improvement.  If a student was not playing sports, participating in a club, or being tutored after school he or she was often looked down upon.  My classmates filled their calendar with all sorts of extracurricular activities that left them exhausted and overwhelmed.  When homework obligations were added onto these busy schedules, stress levels rose even higher.  

Adults were similarly focused on being “busy.”  Many came from families where both parents worked outside the home, but they also loaded extra activities into their own already busy days.  Being productive, being useful, improving oneself were goals that seemed to be driving forces for everyone.  There was no time, and no tolerance, for just being.  Being busy was prized and encouraged.  I get stressed out just thinking about it!

This attitude goes against so much of what Odell states in her book, and I think this would be my personal forwarding of her message. Odell urges people to resist, and this is also relevant to me because in high school I resisted this atmosphere of being constantly busy and productive. Although I did not watch the birds, I used this metaphor as a way to be more aware of the physical world around me. I love being outside just for no other reason than to feel the sun or see the flowers. I won’t pretend to say that I meditated in a rose garden, listened deeply, or paid real attention to the different kinds of bugs in a watershed, but I do think I was able to stay more focused on other things instead of intentionally being too busy to observe them.

Odell quotes Gilles Delueze in describing the abundance of pointless talk that seems to have little meaning. She points out the necessity for quiet, for the peacefulness to be alone and to be silent. This is also something I think is important to forward. I think the world seems full of noisy chatter and needless talk. Odell recalls how she started coming to the Rose Garden every day after the Presidential Election in 2016. Needing time to think, reflect and be alone with her thoughts, Odell also seems like she wanted to get away from the noisy world of political arguments, constant discord, and the angry accusations that seemed to flood the national scene. I can totally relate to this because I lose patience with people who feel some compulsion to fill the air with noise and empty words. This is not to say that I think my ideas are better, but like those who feel some need to stay busy, there are many people I know who feel they must always talk. Why are people so afraid of silence? When I ask this question to my friends, they often answer that being quiet is socially awkward and inappropriate. Again, as Odell states, silence is the way to obtain deep listening; to hear birdsong, and the message the birds want to communicate. In society’s need to feel useful and productive, people also seem to feel like it is necessary to fill any silence with useless words. “What if we spent less time shouting into the void and being washed over with shouting in return-and more time talking in rooms to those for whom our words are intended? If we have only so much attention to give, and only so much time on this earth, we might want to think about reinfusing our attention and our communication with the intention that both deserve.” Odell is trying to encourage us to “speak deeply” like she advocates “deep listening.” There is no sense to speak or hear words that just form noise.

Writing 2 Suneil Harzenski

In Jenny Odell’s book “How to Do Nothing” she analyzes how we are caught up in the attention economy and how we fall victim to the anxiety producing mindset that it creates. Before reading this book I was unclear as to what the attention economy even was. After a quick google search I learned that it boils down to management of human attention as a scarcity. Odell argues that this economy is destructive to the thing it attempts to facilitate, creativity and art. Her solution to this is that we need to get out of the cycle of doing something all the time. Whether that be thinking of ideas or putting them into action, there needs to be a time of nothing. That nothing can be many things like walking in a park or just sitting in a dark room. She wants us to do this because it gives us time. Time to think, time to reflect, time to clear your mind and time to understand. By giving us this time she hopes that we see things in different light and can change our beliefs to protect the things that truly matter most to us.

“How to Do Nothing” is Odell’s collection of life events and experiences attempting to push her arguments. This is not written as an essay format however “ The arguments and observations i’ll [Odell] make(s) here are not neat, interlocking parts in a logical whole.” She draws on mostly things that happen outside, in nature and about the living. One example of Odell showing how doing nothing can result in a deeper understanding comes from the introduction. In the introduction she tells the story of Old Survivor in which California’s redwoods were cut down for timber after the gold rush. After the deforestation there was thought to be no remaining old redwoods in the area, however it was later discovered that there was one left, Old Survivor. This tree is a “wordless testament to a very real past”. It survived because of both its mysterious location and its relatively small and twisted shape. “Old Survivor survived “largely by appearting useless to loggers as a timber tree.” Odell used this story to show how the resistance of a tree can translate into our lives and so we cannot be “appropriated by a capitalist value system”. Odell uses this and many stores like it to portray her narrative about our society and why our ways of thinking need to be changed. 

Odell is able to connect these life experiences by reducing them down to their very core. She wrote about the act of birdwatching, how in the beginning all she noticed were more bird sounds and how overtime she began to associate the different bird songs with the different species of birds. She then uses birdwatching to tell about how the “moment of stopping to listen” is easily connected to the twisted qualities of the attention holding economy. She not only connects each individual story to her main theme but she connects the stories she tells with other stories and experiences. She will then go back and relate it all with the main topic but even then it will be through her stories. An example of this is how she went from bird watching and the individual tone of the birds to her mother’s language, where only when she stopped and slowed down did she realize that her own mother spoke not two different languages but three. Someone Odell had known for her entire life and it was only when she did “nothing” did she find out. This sets the idea that if we don’t stop to do nothing, there will be so much in life that we miss because we never had the chance to realize them. 

Doing nothing is a state of mind that in today’s attention economy is all but gone. Social media like snapchat and instagram are plagued with ad’s that attempt to capture the attention of readers and users. This short attention span that people today have results in a lack of creativity and an increase of becoming a slave to corporations. Desire and greed are in plenty but art and empathy are in short supply. Odell’s “How to Do Nothing” hopes to change that mindset and create one of understanding, peace and enjoyment.