The Nothing That Is

For the listener, who listens in the snow,
And, nothing himself, beholds
Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.
— Wallace Stevens

I mentioned in a recent post that we often spend a good bit of time “doing nothing”. Certainly more than we used it. Early on on this trip we ran around and did things. And sometimes we still do, but I would say less than we used to. These days, so long as it’s a wild enough spot, we’re happy hanging around camp, walking whatever trails or seashore might be around and generally doing “nothing”.

In the post linked above the “nothing” is staring out at the sparkling waters of Pensacola’s East Bay, but it could be anything really. I spent hours watching the pine forests of Colorado, the deep woods of Mount Shasta, the deserts of the southwest, the rocky stream beds of Utah, the snowy peaks of the Sierra Nevada. We stare at campfires almost every night.

Staring at nothing isn’t doing nothing. It so happens that watching the world in silence isn’t something our culture considers valuable and so you and I have been trained to casually dismiss it as “doing nothing”. But the more I’ve done it, the more I realized that sitting, “doing nothing” is actually, possibly, the secret of the world so to speak. Whatever it may be, I can say from experience that it’s incredibly valuable to me now and has helped me grow by leaps and bounds as a person.

It took me quite a while to internalize this idea, even if I might have said it from the beginning. Somewhere in that nothing though, I’ve come to recognize that there’s a big difference between saying something and knowing it through experience.

A couple years ago the National Academy of Sciences solemnly declared that “nature experience reduces rumination and subgenual prefrontal cortex activation, which is inscrutable science jargon for “walking in the woods makes you feel less stressed and happier”. The linked article is about as exciting as the title implies, but it is interesting in one respect, not a very scientific respect, but an interesting one nonetheless: just being in nature alters the way your brain works. The subjects of the study reported less rumination, which, in this context means self-focused behavioral withdrawal, or what we would call depression.

That’s nice and the study authors go on to talk about how nature in urban spaces can maybe possibly help with mental illness, which is one of those things that seems self-evident to me, but that’s sort what science has become at this point, “proving” the self evident. And really, helping with depression is good, but that’s really just scratching the surface of something much bigger. Especially if you consider the reverse proposition.

To me one of the basic realizations of existence is that what makes us feel truly happy and fulfilled as human beings is not at all what our society holds out to us to supposedly achieve those ends.

And that’s not to pick on our particular society. Read through the works of the Greek mystics, Hindu, early Christians and half a dozen other cultures and it’s a re-occurring theme in all of them. It may just be that society is not the place to look for what’s supposed to make us feel happy and fulfilled.

It may be that that’s already a part of us if we stop long enough, become still enough and work hard enough to find it.

This notion has immense implications that I’m not going to touch here, but I do highly recommend finding a quiet spot or maybe take a walk in the woods and consider it. If nothing else just being out in nature will make you feel better.