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In the film, The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, Walter embarks on a life-changing journey ridden with many twists and turns in search of Sean, a photographer, whom he desperately needed to see. And so, when he was told he could find Sean on the heights of a mountain in the Himalayas, he went there. And lucky he was, he did find him there, behind his camera mounted on a tripod, patiently waiting to catch a rare sight of a snow leopard. He tells Walter to settle in just so he does not scare off the “ghost cat” as it barely lets itself be seen. A moment later, Sean, seeing through the lens of his camera, sights the snow leopard he has been waiting for. He tells Walter to come catch a glimpse too.
“When are you gonna take it?” Walter asked.
“Sometimes I don’t,” Sean replied. “If I like a moment, I don’t like to have a distraction of the camera. I just wanna stay in it.”
“Stay in it?” Walter repeated, his eyebrows shooting up in surprise.
“Yeah, right there, right here”, Sean said, his eyes following the snow leopard as it oozed out of innermost joy.
This scene tells us of the joy of being in the moment, of experiencing the here and now, in its totality, as a means of finding the joy in our existence even in creative, demanding, pursuits. For Walter, every moment that seems worthwhile is to be captured, maybe cherished, but not cherished in its totality, in being at unity with the thing itself, whatever the experience is.
This highlights the bane of our modern existence. Today, our desire for picturesque experiences is not for the nourishment of our souls, but for the pursuit of more and more, of picture-worthy experiences. Our lives have descended into an elusive chase akin to trying to catch soap with wet hands. We want more, we do more, but we lose ourselves at the expense of this more. Capturing, writing, walking, running—in essence ‘doing’—characterizes our existence. And reduced to mere verbs, we have somewhat become zombies incapable of thinking through what it really means to be human, to actually be ‘doing’. This culture has equated busyness with contemplative doing. It has, in the words of Cal Newport, the author of Slow Productivity, brought an internalized culture valorizing busyness, driven by online productivity influencers, that’s leading to our exhaustion”, and an apparent lack in fully experiencing the joy of the here and now.
As a result, we now see, without necessarily seeing, and we hear, without really hearing, as the right seeing just as the right hearing requires a contemplative calmness we cannot afford. Our being-in-the-world is thereof not in harmony with our very own being. We, in some sense have therefore become vulgarly curious. A curiosity which is no longer of its own accord, but of the busyness culture which permeates its atmosphere. For such curiosity, as Martin Heidegger puts it, “concerns itself with seeing, not in order to understand what is seen ( that is, to come into being towards it) but just in order to see. It seeks novelty only in order to leap from it anew to another novelty.” This makes the art of lingering in expectation, of just experiencing the here and now, seem pointless, since lingering requires the patience to proceed gradually, consistently, and affording oneself time for relaxations at intervals. And so, he continues, “when curiosity is characterized by a specific way of not tarrying alongside what it is closest,...it does not seek the leisure of tarrying observantly, but rather seeks restlessness and the excitement of continual novelty and changing encounters. In not tarrying, curiosity is concerned with the constant possibility of distraction” and not deriving joy and fulfilment in whatever experience it is.
This reminds me of when I decided to be a writer about six years ago, I also caught myself in this vicious cycle of doing. I was so determined that I practised to the point I almost deluged my existence, to the point that writing began to feel like a chore. The joy of it, just like the joy of any creative process, vanished. I became like a slot machine meant to just churn out words, without recourse to feeling, to embracing, to enjoying the process of it all. The same thing happened when I started learning calligraphy. In a bid to attain mastery, I rendered the experience into a chore. Instead of enjoying it for the creative process it is, embracing the learning curve in a drip-drop fashion, I however aimed at efficiency by doing more and more without really understanding what this more is, to the point I dreaded the whole process.
Life is not meant to be like this. Life is unveiling itself, even unfolding itself, right before us. It is to our best interest that we cherish it as it is, for only then can we experience its immense joy. We must not let our work, our pursuits, our creative process, to descend into a nightmarish experience. We must, as argued by Cal Newport, embrace a philosophy which entails doing fewer things, working at a natural pace, and obsessing over quality, one of slow productivity. A philosophy, he writes, that “posits that professional efforts should unfold at a more varied and humane pace, with hard periods counterbalanced by relaxation at many different timescales, and that a focus on impressive quality, not performative activity, should underpin everything.”
And so, just like Sean, if we like a moment, whatever it is, we must do well to stay in it, to enjoy it, to feel it, to not drown ourselves in an act of self-hypnosis, a ‘doing’ akin to a deliberate drowning of our consciousness, except of reduced activity which translates into a doing characterized by slow productivity.
Thank you for this newsletter, I will learn to enjoy the process of everything I do, instead of seeing it as a chore.