On doing nothing, quietly

Taking a break from information

Last weekend I went to a restorative yoga class. Restorative yoga is the best kind of yoga because you just lie on a mat propping parts of yourself up with cushions. The idea is that you relax about as much as it’s possible to relax without drifting into unconsciousness.

Unfortunately I didn’t reach this hallowed state because the teacher would not stop talking. She just would not. She told us what to do and how to arrange our limbs, and then, instead of granting my deepest wish and letting us lie there in peace, she embarked on an anatomy lecture. Each pose was five minutes long and she talked for almost the entire duration of each one. When she got to the end of her spiel she reiterated what she’d said at the beginning, before eventually coming to a stop about thirty seconds before it was time to change to a different pose and begin the whole cycle again.

A few days later I recounted this to a colleague who teaches yoga on the side and shares my preference for yoga teachers who say as little as possible. She commiserated, then said something I found quite insightful. She thought overly chatty teachers of restorative yoga, in particular, might be uncomfortable with the perception that they are asking you to do nothing. This makes a lot of sense to me. The whole point is to lie about passively, but passivity gets such a bad rap in this world that they want you — or assume you must want — to be passive actively. You’ve paid to be there; you must be seen to be getting something for your money. And so there must be information. Expertise must be shared.

We live in an information economy and a yoga class is an economic transaction, so perhaps this shouldn’t come as a surprise. But I, like most people in the modern Western world, spend my working life ensconced in information, and there’s not exactly a shortage of it in my leisure time either. The supposed informationlessness of a restorative yoga class was precisely what made me want to go to it.

Doing nothing, when not enforced by circumstance, is both a great luxury and a great challenge, to the point that I will literally pay you to get me away from my to-do list and my laptop, to ban me from using my phone, to minimise the need for speaking words, and to show me how to sprawl stretchily on the floor while making no muscular effort whatsoever. So please. Shh. Let me enjoy all the nothing I am finally doing.

I have to confess that wishing people would speak less has been a running theme in my life lately. The weekend before the notorious yoga class Roberto and I went to Strawberry Hill House in West London, a gothic wedding cake of a place that everyone should visit. The only problem with it, for a curmudgeon such as myself, was that it was full of extremely keen volunteers who stalked the halls and corridors hunting down opportunities to share their extensive knowledge.

It really is very nice

Roberto was everything they wanted in a visitor: he asked questions, made jokes, had conversations. I, on the other hand, spent much of the visit trying to avoid eye contact. I did want to know things about Strawberry Hill House, just not necessarily the same things as they wanted to tell me, and certainly not as many.

After we left we walked past a banner on the fence advertising for volunteers who would be able to ‘talk knowledgeably about the house’. I suspect the volunteer recruitment programme shared a rationale with my chatty yoga teacher: that the more people learn, the better their money will have been spent.

But my brain needs its fallow periods. More than learning about Strawberry Hill House, I wanted to look at it. Everywhere you turned there was eccentric opulence and lavish ridiculousness — bright colours, intricate carvings, stained glass, mirrored walls — and just moving from room to room, drinking it all in with my eyes, seemed like money perfectly well spent to me.

For context, I’m an introvert-ish only child who grew up in the countryside. Being quiet feels like my baseline. It’s not that I don’t enjoy having conversations, I just need my engaged talking time counterbalanced by peaceful thinking time, during which I prefer not to be set upon with anatomical lectures or unsolicited historical facts.

I think it must be a measure of how rare peaceful thinking time is, in our always-on world, that even restorative yoga classes can’t be relied upon to provide it. If you, like me, are feeling the lack of it, I can recommend purposefully seeking out spaces in which to do nothing, quietly. I’ve been doing this quite a bit lately, and it’s been glorious. There’s a church near my work that I think of as the secret church, and sometimes I go and sit there, listening to the cavernous silence and watching the light coming through the high windows and trying to remember how that Larkin poem goes.¹ It feels sort of radical to take my full lunch entitlement and spend it doing nothing in a church, even though I live in capitalism and I’m not a Christian.

I’ve also taken my not-Christian self to two Quaker meetings recently, once with my friend Emily because we were curious, and then again on my own because I appreciated it so much the first time. Quaker meetings, if you weren’t aware, consist of sitting in silence until somebody feels moved to say something. The first time I went, four people stood up and spoke, a little archipelago of language in the lovely wordless sea. The second time, no one spoke at all. The whole ethos of the meeting could almost have been derived from what might be my favourite line of any book ever:

“You don’t ever have to say anything … Always remember that as a thing you need never do. Many’s the man lost much just because he missed a perfect opportunity to say nothing.”

That’s from Foster by Claire Keegan, itself an exquisite manifesto for using words more sparingly. The film is brilliant too. It’s called The Quiet Girl.

‘Til next time,

Kx

1. Rather than words comes the thought of high windows: / The sun-comprehending glass, / And beyond it, the deep blue air, that shows / Nothing, and is nowhere, and is endless.