You Might Not Be "Doing Nothing"

You might be healing.

Hello, friends! Welcome to The Slow Take, my occasional newsletter about the strange beauty of being human. I’m a poet and an essayist, and the author of Raising a Rare Girl and Psalms of Unknowing. I recently wrote here about The Spiritual Practice of Doing Nothing. I’m continuing in that vein today, with this quick essay about an octopus.

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A few years ago, I struck upon a pandemic miracle: For the first time in a year, I had thirty-six hours alone. My husband and kids visited the grandparents. After intense, Olympic-style tidying, I turned to the altar of pandemic leisure—Netflix—and took seriously my ample, overwhelming options. I settled on My Octopus Teacher.
 
You might know the story: Off the western Cape of South Africa, a man named Craig Foster visits an octopus every day. Diving daily into a kelp forest, Craig witnesses the octopus’s ingenuity in keeping black starfish off her food. He watches as she camouflages orange and gold and brown, mimicking not just the color but the texture of whatever she glides across.

One day he reaches a hand out, and she reaches an appendage back, her white circular suctions kissing his human skin. They become friends.

Image: Underside of an octopus. Many circular suctions on its appendages.

Then one day Craig watches her predator, a striped, meter-long “pyjama shark,” chase her through the trunks of kelp trees. The shark sends her around rocks and into a crevice. The shark succeeds in tearing off a limb before swimming away. 
 
Craig watches as the octopus creeps along the ocean floor limpingly, which seems an absurd word to use about an octopus. But yes, the octopus sometimes walked, leg upon leg. And now, she is limping home.
 
Craig finds her the next day. She’s alive but unmoving. She’s weak and white. Her lids stay shut, resembling little black hyphens on the orbs of her protruding eyeballs. Day after day, Craig finds her the same sad way. He doesn’t say in the documentary what the viewers fear.
 
After about a week of bearing witness to what looks like a slow death, Craig spots it: a perfect arm in miniature. It’s growing in the place where her appendage had been torn off.
 
She hadn’t been dying. She’d been growing. She’d been healing.

This is the part I find ripe with metaphor. At times, recovery might look like doing a whole lot of nothing. Crawling under a rock and taking many deep breaths. But it’s not defeat. And it’s certainly not death. It’s restoration. It’s healing.

In post-pandemical times, my need to “do nothing” was profound. Following the intensity of lockdown, I needed to recover—from the zoom-schooling, the pivot-teaching, the constant multi-tasking, and yeah, the heartbreak.

For different reasons, I find myself again longing to “do nothing.” I wrote about that here.

Fallow periods might look like death to us sometimes. They can look like death on land too, if you glance across a field and see no sprouts. Trees bare. Bushes brown. Nothing alive. 

But growth has many stages. And some of the stages resemble—at least from the outside—diminishment, or languishing. Maybe they feel that way on the inside too. I wish I could interview octopi.

Thomas Keating says that, in the spiritual life, your progress will feel like your backtrack—or even, at times, like death. He uses the image of a spiral staircase. As you ascend the staircase, entering new stages of spiritual maturity, you also descend, excavating the less-than virtuous parts of yourself. As you grow, you perceive more ways that you falter and fail, act out of your “false self.” And you’re asked to let that “false self” go. This can make you feel like crap. It might even feel a bit like death. But apparently, it’s a good sign. It’s the ground for new life.

“Down is up and up is down,” he says. “So you can’t be humbled without being exalted, and you can’t be exalted without being humbled.”

Eventually, the octopus’s little arm became a fully-formed octopus appendage. She splayed (in snowflake-like symmetry) across rocks, across Craig’s chest, across anything she liked—all eight limbs of herself.

Then she swam away like a fluid parachute in the ocean. 

It’s a helpful image when something appears to be dying. Or when you or someone you love seems to crash. Or even when you find yourself on the couch midday, with no ability to rally toward your to-do list.

Maybe you’re just growing a necessary metaphorical appendage.

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P.S. —

Maria Bowler

suggests that artists and makers build restorative periods into their processes. Especially after a big project is complete, you might plan for a stretch of time when you noodle about, pluck around a garden, or take slow walks. She says these periods can be essential for our next work, even though they might look and/or feel like “doing nothing.”

My favorite noodling activity is perusing thrift store racks. Scraping hangers of old clothes across a metal bar is deeply soothing to me. It also offers the possibility that I’ll find an organic linen Eileen Fisher sweater—which I totally did the other week, for $8. Or this chambray dress & straw hat….

Do you have a favorite noodling activity? A way to restore yourself that looks kind-of like “doing nothing”? I hope you get to enjoy it this week.