[The following is the content of this week’s email update. If you’ve already read it in your email, the best use of your time is to skip this. It’s the same thing.]
Good morning!
Hello from the parking lot of the Rte 3 McDonald’s in Loudonville, Ohio. This is where I can connect to the internet while we are staying at the cabins at Mohican State Park for a family reunion on my wife’s side of the family.
In a way, it serves as a family reunion on my side of the family because much of my family is buried less than a mile from here, on a beautiful hill that overlooks much of this side of town. Later this week I’ll spend an hour up there, as I usually do, talking to gravestones and remembering.
There might be no better place than at a cabin with no internet access to read the book I brought, How to Do Nothing by Jenny Odell. It’s a brilliant book about the art of doing nothing. I appreciate that she clearly distinguishes between “dropping out” in the traditional definition of doing nothing. Instead, she gives examples of the ways that 60’s hippies and Epicurus dropped out, and emphasizes the lessons learned.
I love that, as of a quarter of the way through, she has not lost sight of the fact that we need each other in a larger, more collective way than we generally acknowledge. It is hard to reconcile that with the need to put down our devices. Faces, not screens. We must remember that.
I must remember that.
