Stop
reading. Right now. Push yourself up from your chair and walk around the room.
Count to ten before coming back. Be uncluttered. I’ll still be here, trust me.
Now I’ll begin. I read a New York Times opinion article called
"The 'Busy' Trap" recently and it made me think about something that I’d like
to call “busy thinking.” A few years ago, I thought that I could use every
leisure minute to think of future responsibilities, new projects, new ways to
organize, essay brainstorming, and other ways to utterly abandon the present
moment. This was my definition of productivity my sophomore year.
Side-note: This was before I lightened up and watched an episode
of The West Wing the night before an essay was due
because I felt like it and, quite frankly, that essay deadline could go to
hell. Right then at least. My high-school serious-study self had always thought
my dad was wrong. His college strategy of playing ten minutes of arcade pinball
per every fifty minutes of studying seemed like a waste of time. I finally
learned he was right.
But back then, I would try to skip breaks. To consider the
counterarguments of Descartes’s “cognito ergo sum” and then jump to another
topic and another, while on a 6-mile run. That's how I justified the 6-mile
run, in some small way at least. I filled my head with something else to keep
busy. I would also start cleaning projects, or organizing computer files but
jump to another thing and another without finishing anything—or at least
slowing completion. I abandoned trains of thoughts without a station in sight.
It wore me down. This multi-tasking frenzy was a mental drag, a symptom of
procrastination, and a delusion shielding me from priorities.
On Monday morning this week, with a to-do list of eighteen items
from putting up my window blinds (move-in time!) to grocery shopping (after
all, Monday is my Saturday, as far as my work schedule goes), I spent more than
half the morning on the internet without meaning to. I mean, I put the window
blinds up and I did ab work. Combined, that’s forty minutes. But that’s part of
three hours that it took before I went onto the next item on the list, which
was running. I still hadn’t eaten breakfast.
I felt that this time-consuming internet loop of going
article-to-article or Youtube video-to-video or Facebook-newsfeed-scrolling was
really similar to that sophomore “busy thinking” experiment. Except this was
addicting and intentionally non-productive. I still felt mental drag by the
end, and I realized that it was the self-imposed clutter that bothered me, not
the tasks themselves. And the more clutter I focused on, the less productive my
day was going. Even my 18-item list served as evidence.
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| Running Out of the Frame |
So finally I went for my 6-mile run. My brain relaxed into a
healthy rhythm. Spending forty-four minutes exploring my new neighborhood of
North Oakland was one way to look at it, but another was that I was meditating.
Which, technically, I was.
Tim Kreider, the writer of the New York Times article, describes
idleness in a productive way, as “not just a
vacation, an indulgence or a vice; it is as indispensable to the brain as
vitamin D is to the body, and deprived of it we suffer a mental affliction as
disfiguring as rickets.” He doesn’t mean idleness so much as meditative
activities, or things that let you accept absence from busyness.
Running is my vacation. My meditation.
From work, from stress, from normal life weighed down by time and
responsibilities—and from mental clutter. Another way to term the dilemma that Kreider’s
article discusses is this environment-induced clutter—even in the non-work
setting: too many TV shows to watch, too many posts to read online, too much to
think about. Social media, facebook, reddit, they’re great. But there is a
point when that five minutes on a website reaches an hour marker we didn’t mean
to reach.
And we check Facebook, Reddit, Twitter, Instagram again and again,
when we have free time. Self-control is battling real-time social stimuli. I
get onto BART, boredom settles in like a bad smell, and I pull out my phone,
almost instinctively. But am I also checking my phone at dinner with my parents
between sips of wine? Then I worry when others aren’t doing it constantly too.
The girl I liked didn’t respond to my text. That must mean she doesn’t find me
interesting. When did we start believing that real-time messaging had to have
the same social cues as real conversations? And when did our online identities
start catching up to our real ones?
I admit that some of this residual resistance to technological
leisure binging and cluttering is from the years long ago when I had to mute
commercials and could only watch an hour of television if I read two chapters
of a book.
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| One New Message... |
But the internet has the power now to clutter our lives and
we let it. I sometimes try to go online just to do one quick search. Oh but
there’s a picture of a cute animal on someone’s Facebook wall and a new movie
trailer and a new song and… It turns into the grocery-store dilemma: I leave a while
later realizing I didn’t get the one item I came into the store to get.
So I run. It’s impossible to clutter that space of time with
anything else. Even my perception of time changes. It becomes measured by
strides and breaths—it feels excitingly primitive, as if I can determine the
duration of a second as fast or slow. I can go anywhere, to the edge of the Bay
or to the Berkeley hills or through a hidden alley between houses. Time and
space become relative to my pace.
I still return to the internet. I like the addicting “busy
thinking” done for me, with so many options to shift my attention to all the
time. I don’t want to be unplugged. It’s the Matrix I agree to be part of.
Kreider calls American busy-bodies “addicted to busyness and dread what they
might to face in its absence.” It seems like that even in our down time. Especially
in our downtime. My remedy for absence is to embrace it, which naturally
happens on a long run.
But I
like the clutter too. Just, why exactly do we return to the clutter of
articles, posts, newsfeed, tweets? Is it because so quickly we miss it? Or
because we need it?
