Doing nothing sharpens the ability to listen to what is actually there

Evidence

The second tool that doing nothing offers us is a sharpened ability to listen. I’ve already mentioned Deep Listening, but this time I mean it in the broader sense of understanding one another. To do nothing is to hold yourself still so that you can perceive what is actually there. As Gordon Hempton, an acoustic ecologist who records natural soundscapes, put it: “Silence is not the absence of something but the presence of everything.” Unfortunately, our constant engagement with the attention economy means that this is something many of us (myself included) may have to relearn. — Jenny Odell, How to Do Nothing, 108

Categorization

• XREF: Hempton’s quote echoes the reader’s prior reading in One Square Inch of Silence, where silence is treated as positive presence rather than absence.