The tragedies in Buffalo and Uvalde confront us with more reality than we can shield ourselves from entirely.
And it’s not just these killings. There has been a piling-on of cold realities, what feels like years of them.
It’s often just me and Wally here during the day, so I’ll have the news on for the din of human voices, but the risks of “opening myself to a world that keeps bringing this kind of news” are palpable, because once I know the outlines of the next catastrophe I want to know why it happened and more of the particulars. Curiosity becomes the enemy that wears you down with the corrosion of trying to satisfy it. Far too often, it leaves you flattened, feeling bitter, and stained by its ugliness.
Even more salt gets rubbed in by the developing narratives, particularly when the news explainers get it wrong in their search for the villain.
Most recently, these “telephone chains” of talking heads, telling the next version of the same story over and over again, failed to appreciate that “the gun lobby” is not the bogeyman in Texas or New York—at least not anymore. While the groundwork for today’s impasse over “weapons of war” was surely laid by the NRA and its advertising machine decades ago, today it has far less money, almost no effective leadership, and little influence left to exert. It's simply not the villain anymore.
At least a third of Americans—or a 100+ million of us—have already been convinced that interference of any kind with their 2d Amendment freedoms is an unacceptable encroachment by arrogant elites (who always think that they know better) and interfering bureaucrats (who always get it wrong more than right). In other words, what the gun lobby aimed to accomplish years ago has already been “baked in” to many of us, and none of the explainers that I’ve been hearing this week seem to be blaming a significant cross-section of America for Buffalo and Uvalde, or even more importantly, talking about the necessary conversation that the other two thirds of America need to be having with America's gun-holders today.
The silence around both our divides and our need to bridge them is deafening. It’s like we're ships passing each another in the night, spending our time on board shouting about the injustice, mostly to ourselves.
When the news is too much, keeps getting it wrong, and ends up raving to itself—because gun owners, as a group, aren’t even listening to those who are blaming what’s left of the gun lobby for these massacres—turning my news channel off, or hitting "Mute," still doesn’t make the cold realities go away. (And it shouldn’t, because where we find ourselves isn’t somebody else’s problem.) But turning off the bad news still leaves me trying to find some sort of relief in the sudden silence that I’ve given myself.
The silence around both our divides and our need to bridge them is deafening. It’s like we're ships passing each another in the night,
spending our time on board shouting about the injustice, mostly to ourselves.
So where does a silence that can hold better possibilities than these begin?
This woodblock print, with yet another umbrella, is called “Snowy Evening at Kambara,” and it's by Utagawa Hiroghige. The prints up top and below are by the renowned Japanese printmaker Kawase Hasui, “Snow at Ueno Klyomizu-do” and “Ochanomizu in Snow.”
Jenny Odell might find better possibilities deep inside one of those two umbrellas.
She’s a writer and Stanford professor whom I’ve mentioned here before, one of the stars of my post from last June, We Don’t Have to Be Productive All the Time. In it I profiled Odell's proposal that there is something essential to human nature about safeguarding our time and mental space in a way that refuses further agendas—that is, some profit motive, anticipated productivity boost or self-improvement—beyond filling free time and space with undirected activities that can be savored for themselves.
(Like playing with a child or a dog, or learning how to cook a new meal through a mess of unfamiliar ingredients. We get too little of that kind of time and those kinds of spaces, don’t we?)
So if Odell were to see us withdrawing into the safety of, say, an umbrella to protect ourselves from “all that weather,” her instinct wouldn’t be to draw us out from our crouch, or guide us to a character-building response. She also wouldn’t advise closing-in on ourselves as we stand there, stewing in a moment that feels cold and maybe lonely. Instead, she might suggest looking at the snow-muted light seeping through the umbrella’s membrane, or letting our eyes wander into the geometry of struts that open and close it. In other words, she’d recommend getting lost in—and finding a restful pause—in something (or someone) that’s already right in front of us but too seldom appreciated.
In that same spirit, Odell might urge us to allow one of the flakes of snow that are swirling around to capture our attention. Or a in different context, to turn our focus from the next item on our “To-Do” lists to an interesting reflection on a kitchen’s surface, or the outlines cast by the sinking sun on an office wall when it starts acting like a shadow puppet. It could be something as mundane as the busyness of an insect around a flower that draws us in, or even a plastic bag dancing in the wind, like the one that kept doing so in the great American Beauty (since actor Kevin Spacey was also part of the onslaught of news this week).
Against the harshness that presses down and calls out for some relief, Odell would recommend letting the mind (and heart) rest in what she calls an “almost psychedelic encounter” with something close at hand but still unfamiliar, because of how far towards recovery reclaiming our attention and re-focusing it like that can take us.
She’s saying: I don’t need to be overwhelmed or pinned down by these rushes of cold reality. I can find refreshment in the simple act of paying attention to something around me that usually escapes it.
Jenny Odell on Twitter: “This is what my ‘research’ looks like.”
Someone I follow regularly led me to an essay about Odell that appeared in The Guardian around the time that her book on this kind of rejuvenation (and so many other things) came out in 2017. After another profoundly disquieting week, I thought I might be refreshed by her approach “to doing nothing,” which is not being empty but feeling the space of our focus that somebody else (or our own misguided impulse “to do more”) always want to fill. Odell urges us to reclaim the boundaries of our attention, particularly when they're being overwhelmed by all that’s been happening around us. To her, “taking shelter” in this peaceful place whenever we need to is necessary to flourish, and sometimes even survive.
Odell refers to the words of a French philosopher (Gilles Deleuze) to frame the problem, which is that there is too much noise out there and too little chance to hear anything worthwhile. Deleuze found too many of us “riddled with pointless talk, insane quantities of words and images” as well as the daily challenge of finding “little gaps of solitude and silence in which [to] find…the rare, and even rarer thing that might be worth saying [or hearing].” Odell’s corrective is to step back from the barrage and make an effort to immerse ourselves in things we’ve never really focused on because we’ve always seen them as “time wasters” where there’s “nothing to be gained.” But maybe we’ve been wrong all along about that.
“Many will recognize that slightly out-of-body sensation of being confronted by limitless possibilities in an unfamiliar [or over-looked] place, and the refreshing, restorative effect it can have; the trick to surviving this modern world, Odell says, is to be able to access that plane as and when necessary.”
For example, she’s always found her easiest withdrawals in nature, from studying the intricacy of a leaf to going on meandering hikes, although she immediately says it would be wrong to call what she does anything as purposeful as “a hike.” Instead, it’s:
“’just me, sitting on a rock or under a tree somewhere. I’ll be on some other planet in my head, then I’ll see some trail runners who clearly just got off work, and it’s their exercise…whereas I was having this almost psychedelic encounter with very specific plants’….[It’s] a kind of mindfulness that Odell is describing, albeit stripped of any connection to the wellness industry; the practice of simultaneously seeing more and zooming in with hyper-precision….[like when she] happen[s] upon a clearing full of sage plants and its ‘amazing smell,’ or seeing a ‘really amazing warbler’ [and getting lost in its antics]…’When I got back in my car, it was like that time had just disappeared—it had felt like it had been three days.’”
And maybe three days was exactly how long Odell needed to escape from the onslaught of her usual life.
Reclaim the territory of your own attention, particularly when it’s overwhelmed by all that’s been happening around us.
'Taking shelter' in this peaceful place whenever we need to
is necessary to flourish, and sometimes even survive.
Like with any practice, we also need some intentionality, some free will that triggers our withdrawal—because it’s more than drifting off into daydreams or yielding to the next distraction. But Odell’s prescriptions are modest ones. Reclaiming this restorative part of our attention demands “a state of openness that [always] assumes there is something new to be seen” and the discipline to “resist our tendency to declare our observations finished.”
In other words, she’s showing us a door, beyond the inclement weather, that never needs to be closed.
When navigating from one day to the next was particularly hard during the first year of Covid, I wrote to you about two additional strategies that helped me get-by during a stretch that felt a lot like this recent one: Extra from the Ordinary (we can hold our own against some of the disorder by bringing more ceremony, and therefore more to look forward to, into our daily routines) and The Other-Wonder of Tourists and Survivors(when the pubic world threatens to overwhelm us, seeing what’s around us through the eyes of a tourist—as if we’re encountering a strange place for the very first time—can often be both enjoyable and invigorating).
There are always more sustainable ways to live and work, particularly in hard times.
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Thanks for reading, and for your comments about last week's drive through Lancaster County. I’ll see you next Sunday.
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