RANDOM NOTES / TRAVEL DIARY: ON NOT DOING ANYTHING

A quote I picked up from a book or a person this autumn.

Resting means different things to different people but it is good to know your own style and be articulate about your needs so others can respect them.

I get easily stressed. I’m really bad in resting sometimes. I’m bad at articulating my needs on how I need to rest. So I am not the person to give advice on this. Or then I am because I am an “experienced expert”,  “kokemusasiantuntija” we would say in Finnish.

Human’s ability to get too stressed reminds me of our bodily existence. We get too stressed like all other animals. It’s a physiological thing.

Once I had to consciously learn to speak “dog” with my body when I had a new dog friend I wanted to communicate to. I went to take lessons about dog communication & education. One of the things I learned quite quickly was to interpret when he was stressed (yawning, dropping hair, dandruff from his back, lying down but being alert) and when he was relaxed (tail up, sleeping, relaxing without being alert). Stressing was often related to new situations or situations where he didn’t now how he should behave. The articulation of stress is different for different canine individuals but some common signs help you to start learning.

I also learnt that one reason why cats and dogs might get into conflict so often, or why there is this myth, is because dogs and cats have different, even opposing, vocabulary in their body linguistics. Cats are prey animals, dogs have been hunters. For example having your tail up and whipping it is a sign of agression for cats but a sign of friendship for dogs. So they might need to get over these initial misunderstandings, understand the different ways of communicating of each other before they can become friends.

I think I got a bit carried away by this dog-cat-thing. But I really like stories and anecdotes. It helps me understand.

But to come back to not doing anything.


Of course not-doing anything could be very political. At least in a performative sense. As a performance.

I learnt from one of my teachers back at university this wonderful concept of “impotentiality”  (I won’t refer to her name here but I can tell you if you ask as she’s wonderful and probably explains this concept much more gracefully than I do but tho her dissertation hasn’t been yet translated in English bug will soon be then I’ll recommend that).

I understood it meaning humans have so much potentiality, we are capable to do so many things. And that is at the same time our tragedy. We are doing so much, being so acceleratingly productive that we are just collapsing under it, filling the space on Earth with our stuff so that there is less and less space left for anyone else or other.

So what if we would recognise this potentiality but just not use it always.
Sit next to a laptop and not put it on. Not use all the tools we have. Not produce and invent all the possible new ideas and pieces and works and festivals and gadgets we can.
But leave space for the others. Like grasshoppers or cockroaches or lime stone or I don’t know you can come up with something better. But I meant not only to other humans but to all the other creatures sharing this space with us. You can picture someone sitting on a hilltop staring at clouds. Or trees. Sleeping. You can picture something. Maybe you can go to the forest and picture this and not do it.


Really, maybe this fascinates me because it is so hard for me. It even annoys me. The aesthetics of lazyness.  (Does it annoy you? Why?) Everything is so interesting, why to give up. But at the same time I see the power of actively performing not doing anything.

Performing not doing anything for a camera on the beach.