The power of nothing

For the intended experience, please click here to listen to Sally Whitwell’s 2011 recording of Phillip Glass's Opening while reading.

In recent months, I’ve discovered an ailment that I did not know I was suffering from: overstimulation. In the eighteen years that I have been alive, I have never valued idleness. Idleness, not in the sense if relaxing on the couch browsing Reddit or watching a movie, rather idleness in the sense of truly doing nothing.  Although I am usually wasting my time on unproductive things, I always have something to interact with. This constantly mentally active state has been a theme that I have observed among my friends and family. Here is my question to mull over as you read this post. How long has it been since you’ve intentionally done nothing for more than a couple of minutes?

After first feeling this constriction, I decided to experiment with idleness. As it happened, this feeling first occurred during winter finals, so winter break was only a couple days away. I was completely honest with myself, and I decided that I probably wasn’t going to be able to handle silence during my idle sessions, and so, for the increased chance of me carrying out the experiment, I allowed myself music without intelligible words. This happened to be the best possible timing for this whole process because my brother was also visiting home from college for the holidays. As I discovered, he has recently formulated and enrolled in his own form of modern hippieism. This hippieism, as I found out driving home from the airport with him, was based strongly around sitting, doing absolutely nothing, and listening to Psychedelic Rock (thankfully without the recommended “mind-opening” dosage of LSD). Although I don’t exactly consider Psychedelic Rock to be a favorite genre of mine, I love listening to music that is entirely new to me. Since I had already been accepted into college, I had quite literally nothing productive to do with my life, so I decided that an hour a day would be a reasonable amount of idle time. With my plan well flushed out, I embarked on my journey.

It was not easy to keep up my schedule. Per how my life has been organized, there was always something to be doing. Often, we ended up doing these sessions late at night after everybody else, except for my brother and I, was asleep. Also, it was honestly just hard for me to sit still and not do anything for a while hour. The music was the only way I stood a chance of lasting an hour, and I have kept that part of this experiment through till this day. After a week of idle sessions, and based on a sample size of one, this experiment honestly worked. Everything felt more relaxed. Most notably, I didn’t feel sore after practicing the violin anymore. That was something that I had struggled with in a heightened degree during the fall college audition session. I kept up the hour session schedule until the end of winter break, but then for some odd reason, I had to go back to high school for one final semester. The first day back to school, my schedule fell apart.

I had time in the day to have hour-long sessions, but I completely lost motivation. I relapsed into my old ways for a week. The pain came back after practicing, I stopped sleeping well, and, looking back on it, I felt terrible compared to my winter break self. After the first week, I reformulated the structure of the sessions. Here is where the music I linked at the top ties into this narrative. I have been exploring the 20th-century compositional style of minimalism in depth over the past couple years, and I realized that this would be a perfect place to use my knowledge of it. I decided that half an hour of idleness while listening to minimalistic music should be somewhat equivalent to an hour of more stimulating music. Minimalistic music is based around the incredible textures that can be created from simple repetition and so it does not demand the same mentally involved state that stimulating music does. Since that day, I have kept up my schedule, and the benefits have returned. There is an unbelievable amount of minimalistic music to listen to. I started with what I knew; the composer Phillip Glass. He is widely viewed as one of the forefathers of American minimalistic music. The piece that I linked is from his chamber music work called Glassworks. It is a great introduction to this style of music, as it is his successful attempt in creating a work for audiences who were unfamiliar with his style of minimalism. The studio album, which was released in 1982, can be found here. I enjoy this recording, but as a standalone piece, without the other five movements, I love Sally Whitwell’s 2011 recording of Opening. The piece is based around the premise of triplets in the piano's right hand while simultaneous eighth notes occur in the left hand. If you listen to the piece for the texture rather then the notes, I promise you will not be bored.

In the future, I am afraid that my personal dystopia will become a reality for youth across the world. Parents see planned stimulation as something that is essential for the development of the child. Although this is true, I only think it is helpful to a certain extent. I remember the days where I was left to my own devices. My brother and I would pretend to be stranded in the woods behind our house and we would have to create shelter, find food, and grind plants into a paste for medicine. Allowing the mind to do whatever it wants with the resources that it has is rather than forcing a constant stream of activities upon it is the part that I love and remember about my childhood. Everything changes with age. In my teenage years, overstimulation directly caused stress that I could have easily avoided. For me, thirty minutes a day of idleness provides the same relaxing qualities that four hours of an imaginary world did when I was younger. I wish I could still gain the same joy from pretending to be a medicine man in a secret ranger outpost but instead, I’ll have to wage war on stimulation in my new and more adult fashion.

Dante Freund