Empty Vessels of Time
So, what have you been up to?
"Atoms are mainly empty space. Matter is composed chiefly of nothing."
-Carl Sagan, Cosmos
It seems that whenever someone asks me what I've been up to, my mind goes blank, my shoulders shrug, and my throat squeaks: " I've been busy?" This response seems to placate the friendly inquisitors, even though it says nothing specific about me or my life. Some people even preempt my response with a leading question, "What's going on? Have you been busy?" To which I need to only nod and stare inwardly at my blurry life. What have I've been up to, why I haven't seen anyone, and why can't I explain where I've been?
By any measure, I am a busy person, which is to say I'm almost always locked into an activity or task. Two weekends ago, for example, the second weekend since May that we had no out-of-town plans or outdoor ambitions, Dave and I trained our attention on cleaning out the basement. With a single-minded focus that would impress an especially hard-working drone, we moved boxes, sorted through possessions, swept, vacuumed, painted, and made runs to the dump and donation center. I also lifted weights that morning, made dinner that evening, met a friend for a walk, and presented two (different) recipe-intensive birthday cakes to my son for his birthday.
It's not unusual for me to cram as many activities as possible into a day; I am full of vim; I have a lot on my plate. I've got two households of bills to track, freelance work to complete, thank-you cards to send, funds to raise, events to plan, essays to write, and a remodel to manage. I keep four different calendars and divide my ample to-do list into six different domains of my life. I like to live life to the fullest; I believe that every minute counts. I don't want to waste a single second doing nothing when I could be doing something.
Are you impressed? I hope so. Because some twisted part of me feels legitimized when my calendar is booked. Even when my day is full of relaxing activities—a walk with a friend, yoga, a mid-afternoon massage, say—it is still packed. I can (and have) come home from a not-exhausting day of self-care and joined my work-weary husband on the couch and exclaimed, "Whew. Busy day," putting my feet next to his on the ottoman.
True, the lack of a bona fide job often triggers compensatory industriousness (idle hands and all). But I'm not the only one hustling my way through time. My employed friends are run ragged by the pace of their days. Dave regularly complains of hours of back-to-back meetings with no breaks in between. Doctors see hoards of patients all day and then chart all evening. Teachers labor from their packed classrooms, juggling crises, trainings, and lesson planning before returning home to make dinner. Those with multiple jobs dart from one part of town to another, toiling hither and thither just to get by. And apparently, we've adopted this harried pace as a way of life.
I don't know anyone who isn't guilty of filling the few empty spaces in their lives with more stuff: a quick drink with a friend, the news, errands, social media, exercise, organizing, cleaning. I suppose some of these things can be relaxing and fun, but it's a problem when we find ourselves making to-do lists of fun stuff and attacking them like a contestant in a hot-dog eating contest. Several studies confirm that more than half of American workers don't use all their paid vacation days, and those that do tend to work while on vacation. Why? Are we really that afraid of rest?
According to Columbia professor, Silvia Belleza, "an overworked lifestyle and products that showcase one's level of busyness have become status symbols and badges of honor." Belleza studies and writes about status and the elusive nature of status symbols. While leisure was once the domain of the elite, it is not anymore. Apparently, there is something called the "harried leisure class" characterized by "a hectic agenda, filled with productive endeavors and edifying activities," like cleaning basements and baking not one but two complicated cakes to celebrate a birthday. According to her colleagues, Tianqi Chen, A Keinan, and Neeru Paharia in their article hauntingly titled, "'The Wellness Religion:' Consuming Purity as an Aspirational Lifestyle," America's elites are "busy at work, and their leisure time is active, not passive or sedentary, often using physical or mental energy to pursue wellness, health, and personal development."
It's not just living in a culture of busyness that has me worried. It's the way I've been indoctrinated into it. It's the way I perpetuate a fast-moving, occupied, hard-working, diligent, intense way of life by demanding it of my children. My son came home from school last week in a funk. His shoulders slumped forward and he answered my questions with grunts and long pauses, then he took his phone upstairs and disappeared. He probably needed a few minutes to decompress, zone out, and enjoy some solitude. But something inside me wrung my hands with worry and rattled my confidence as a parent. He can't just go upstairs and look at his phone! There's work to be done. If he's going to succeed in life, he's going to have to learn to buck up and show up. Is YouTube going to be the parent or am I? Â
When I harangued him to return to the kitchen, I said helpful things like, "Do you have homework to do? Will you feed the dog? Can you stir the pot while I cut the tomatoes? How was school today?" Sometimes I feel like a kid at the zoo, poking a animal to alleviate my own nagging anxiety, which whispers the same mantra in my ear, day and night, "is there more I can do?"
No wonder the best part of my day is the end of it. This is when I sneak upstairs, brush my teeth, slip out of my clothes and lay down. It's where I officially clock-out and enjoy the roominess of space within time.
Lately, I've spent my capacious, pre-sleep, quiet time reading Cosmos, by Carl Sagan. To be honest, it's been a bit of a slog since I'm so tired that I hardly read a page before dropping to sleep. It took me a week to finish the chapter on star birth. But when I got to the part about atoms, my hand fished around for a pen so I could underline the epigraph above.Â
I don't know why it felt cathartic, but the fact that the smallest unit of matter contains nothing but a bunch of elbow room wormed its way into my psyche. Atoms are not dense; they are light and empty, and the reason the atom manages to hold its structure, and therefore all matter holds structure, is because the tiny electrons that circle the nucleus repel one another. Their electrical force creates space—empty space—inside every single atom in the universe. And without emptiness—open, available, nonproductive space—to cushion the contents of the atom, matter can't exist and everything in the universe "crumbles to an invisible fine dust."
Rightly or wrongly, I concluded from these few paragraphs that the first ingredient in all matter, from an atomic to a cosmic level, is emptiness. The ever-expanding universe is built with gobs of nothing. We are not impoverished with empty space or time; we are replete with it.
I lay there in bed and imagined myself as an atom, using my elbows to summon the electrical charge to fill my life with a kind of spaciousness I need more of. The kind of spaciousness that arises from emptying vessels of time, instead of filling them.
The very next day, I shook out a moment on the couch to read in the mid-afternoon. This, in itself, felt like an act of treason against my productive lifestyle, but it gets worse (or better). Instead of reading, my eye caught the shadows of some branches outside the window casting themselves against the living room walls. I set my book down to watch them. They were mesmerizing and beautiful, and once I’d settled into watching them, I couldn’t think of a compelling reason to stop. In the midst of this seditious wall-gazing, my kids came home and drifted into the room where I lay as if magnetized by my lack of agenda. Like butterflies landing on my hand, they stayed and watched the shadows with me. For the first time in a long time, I drank a deep breath of air and felt sated.
I’ve been looking at my calendar, wondering where to begin, what to cut out, who to disappoint. I can’t fathom a radical change. I still want to do everything I have promised to do.
But I am starting to create open space nonetheless. Instead of running (late) to my next activity, I am trying to saunter into it, pausing to sniff the air, appreciate the perfect fall temperature, crouch down to pat the dog. In the car, I am turning off my thoughts and looking at the road (which is surprisingly difficult). I am more cautious about pursuing wellness, health, or personal development at every turn, and more careless in my pursuit of wasteful intervals of pure, delicious nothingness. With time, I hope to learn to yawn, stretch out, scratch my belly, and look around.
Today, a hatch of smoky-winged ash aphids filled the air like tiny fall snowflakes.
What have I been up to, you ask?
Hopefully, nothing.
good on ya! Learn to do nothing
Love this! I'll try to keep the idea of the importance of empty space in my mind. My life feels pretty unstructured right now, and it's kind of terrifying! But it's reassuring to remember I don't need to plan every moment of my life in advance. Thanks for writing!