It is always claimed that to live happily, one must live hidden. And if I can afford: to hang out effectively and without guilt too. In the word “relax”, there is “loose” and no one wants to be associated with lack of courage, vigor or tone. Oh no! We are so valiant, industrious (derived from trepalium, a three-pronged torture device); no one should suspect the slightest laziness. The nonchalance of our shirking will is regularly put to the test. We are so capable, so much better (than the neighboring country), so Olympic.
Which probably explains why I didn’t watch the Beijing Games once; I feel bad for them. I have never loved the culture of medals, doping and flags. This Olympic pride does not join me. Like the makeup tutorials or the videos ofunboxing (live unboxing). And I wouldn’t want to be a young Russian figure skater, let’s say. Long live yoga, especially since yesterday…
I had to praise the slowness, the slow (food, sex, education, travel, cities) dozens of times in these pages. My life is punctuated by refusals that have allowed me to live partially on the margins; on the sidelines of the race, my anxiety, the herd, a multitude of obligations and a performance that seemed to me very unprofitable compared to what it costs. I am not the only one. I have as companions and muses a few artists, thinkers, poets, musicians, philosophers and all the children, without exception, just before they were made into trained dogs.
My B quit basketball — where he excelled — because of anxiety. The coaches were pushing him; they saw him in college sports, and then wham, he threw the ball and didn’t touch it again after secondary 4. He had lost the fun along the way and medals don’t motivate him. He was going against his nature as an observer. He followed the precepts of Epicurus who enjoined his students to live in anonymity and to be satisfied with little.
Children and cats should be our masters, and not just during spring break. They teach us to look at the world upside down, to slow it down, like when we make snow angels while watching the clouds scroll overhead. It’s crazy good. Even without children. (And there is snow!)
Redemption Lies in a Small Crack in the Disaster Continuum
idle resistance
In his activist handbook disguised as a personal development narrative (or rambling essay) For idle resistance. Do nothing in the XXIand century, the multidisciplinary artist Jenny Odell explains to us from the outset that “nothing is more difficult than doing nothing”. This book praised by former President Barack Obama deals with the attention economy and the abduction of which we are the object from the Web, social networks and tomorrow the metaverse. Go into crypto debt in a parallel universe while you can’t pay your rent in the real, the dream!
Odell sees idle resistance as mere refusal, “the refusal to believe that somehow the present place and time, and the individuals who inhabit it with us, are insufficient.” The “nothing” that Odell proposes is only a “nothing” from the point of view of capitalist productivity. It cannot be sold or bought. He is only presence in the world.
And she asks a visual artist question: “Could ‘augmented reality’ just mean putting your phone down? And when the time comes, what (or who) will we find in front of us? »
Do you kiss your phone when you wake up? I thought also. Odell finds that our marketable attention kept in a profitable state of anxiety, lust and inattention by commercial social networks no longer perceives the world in the same way offline. “It is indeed public opinion that social media exploits, public opinion that has no patience for ambiguity, context or breaks with tradition. So much conformism and mimicry in a kind of ideological monoculture.
Odell asks his students to sit outside for 15 minutes doing nothing. A CEGEP gym teacher did the same last fall with my B class, in Summit Woods, Westmount. My son told me about it as a mystical experience.
What a quarter of an hour can do in a lifetime! No need to do like Thoreau in Walden, to stop paying taxes or to found a municipality in Ham-Nord to get out of society. Fifteen minutes on Mount Royal! Imagine a week.
Overstimulated with a medal
Not hard to see that we are constantly overstimulated. Dead times are dead, precisely. pretty monster East an excellent book on anxiety in which I immersed myself again because it also deals with slowing down. Sarah Wilson, an author committed to mental health issues, observes that “we are the very image of efficiency and dynamism, always on the move, always doing”.
“In our society, anxious behaviors are valued. Being tense, angry, restless and overwhelmed has character. […] “Oh dear ! I’m super busy, totally overwhelmed, it’s crazy!” — sported like a medal. »
The resulting anxiety issues are sanctified, while depression would be stigmatized.
I excited my adrenals with punishing jogging and liters of coffee. I couldn’t let the tower crumble.
If Sarah Wilson invites us to slow down, it’s because she herself suffers from anxiety. I really like his book. And I would recommend it to any medical resident who’s been sleepless and trying to do too much because that’s the unhealthy culture they live in…even suicide.
The Denial Pose is a form of mental yoga that requires courage. Refuse to buy the car that goes with the power job ; refuse the dress code of your caste; to refuse the one-upmanship because it has no end; refuse to better say yes.
In short, a school break should be used to be educated by your children rather than the reverse. In augmented reality. And with no medal.
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