What's Wrong with Bird-Noticing?
A review of How To Do Nothing, kind of
Oops! It has been a month since I’ve written a blog for Substack. I’ve been a bit busy—wedding planning is no joke, and neither is book launch planning—and my leftover thoughts have dispersed into an alphabet soup of the mind. So it’s no surprise that I started reading Jenny Odell’s How to Do Nothing.
I bought the book months ago at Reverie because the cover was beautiful and the title was evocative. I wanted to learn how to do nothing! A previous therapist once gave me the “homework” of doing nothing for five minutes. Week after week, day after day, I failed miserably. In my last semester of college I took a full course load, had three jobs, and had two internships. “Nothing” is the opposite of my specialty.
I’ve read a few different books in the self-help, modern philosopher arena. Or rather, I’ve listened to a few. I tend to listen to self-help or nonfiction books as an audiobook, letting the main points flow in and out of my brain while I’m driving or walking or running. (Not nothing, mind you.) With a lot of these books—The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck and Deep Work being two I enjoyed recently—you can kind of “get it” with the introduction. The rest is usually quite repetitive.
How to Do Nothing is different. The sheer amount of research and art that is packed into this book absolutely blew me away. I will admit, I expected a fluffier, more prescriptive book based on the cover and the title. But Odell is an Oakland artist who knows her stuff. She brings in conceptual art pieces and books about communes and German philosophers to illustrate her points. I’ll admit, a sentence or two about regarding clouds as their identity went over my head. I giggled at some of the wackier art pieces she mentions in the earlier chapters. But I can respect the sheer amount of work, thought, and intention that went into bringing all of this research into a thought-provoking book about attention, focus, and activism.
That being said, I was tickled, surprised, and saddened to see some of the more negative reviews of the book. (Overall, it’s got a 3.7, which I say is a great success.)
Here’s my favorite:
The author’s big idea is that we should all reject capitalist, productivity-driven ideals and take up a life of smelling our own farts and bird-watching (or as the author calls it, “bird-noticing”.)
Who p*ssed—or rather, farted—in her Cheerios?
Furthermore, what’s wrong with bird-noticing?
Choosing to Bird-Notice
My favorite Talking Heads song is called “Nothing But Flowers.” Give it a listen. It satirizes our devotion to corporations and infrastructure; David Byrne sings about a world where the destruction of “Big Yellow Taxi” is reversed and everyone’s mad about it. I love it.
I laugh when I hear this song because, if dropped into a field of flowers, many people like Ms. Smell Our Farts (the reviewer, not Odell) *would* complain. How silly is that?There are people who don’t want to sit and watch a robin peck at the ground.
That is their right, but I do believe they’re missing out.
Today, I am sitting in my backyard, typing this post, listening to the birds. I am combing through Devotions, a collection of Mary Oliver poems that may have saved my sanity in 2023. During this time, the lines between work and life were blurring and fading. My body started taking on the toll of the stress that I was absorbing from the role. My mind was stuck in the screens, and I began to constantly think about interactions that took place solely through digital means.
The words of Mary Oliver pointed me to the window outside my office. I followed her gaze and watched the trees after I read each poem. The longer I watched, the more I got to know the cardinals, lizards, and finches of the backyard. The longer I sat outside and practiced the instructions in these poems, the more birds I could hear. These new discoveries gave me great joy. Over time, I began to seek joy in the mountains and rivers, as the Talking Heads say, feeling relief in not needing to hand over my money to the Pizza Huts, Dairy Queens, and 7-11s. As it turned out, I could get used to this lifestyle.
At every moment, our brains take in a massive amount of stimuli, from the sound of a passing train to the words we see on advertisements to the presence of furniture in the room where we’re standing. We cannot pay attention to all these things simultaneously because it’s too much to handle. Our brain’s reticular activating system filters out what is and what isn’t important.
Hmm. Do we listen to the birds or stay sucked into our phones? Where do we dig in deep and sort out the details?
The answer is up to us and what we’ve trained our brains to do.
Mary Oliver helped me tell my brain that the birds are important. And so my brain started focusing on their songs, their movements, the way they approach the bird feeder that sticks to my office window. I let myself feel overwhelmed with wonder at the way they fly from house to house, so quickly, while I’m limited to clumsily walking through my living room, through my door, and down the street. I continue to make the choice to notice and be grateful for the birds.
How to Do Nothing has revitalized my interest in “bird-noticing.” All day today, I’ve been listening to the different sounds of the cardinals, finches, and jays in the yard. Odell has done the same with birds in her area, noting that bird sounds vary by place and time of year. I have not gotten that far in the weeds (in the trees?) of bird-noticing, but I hope to. Rather, I choose to. I will choose to spend more time listening closely, appreciating more deeply, and focusing more intently.
Albert Einstein once said the two ways to live your life is by seeing everything as a miracle or nothing as a miracle. I’ll take the first option. Our farts, then, are miracles, but so is our entire existence. And the existence of birds. Of books. Of The Talking Heads. Of the choice to notice the world in new and different ways every moment of our existence.
I’ll choose to see the world that way any day, even if I do nothing else. And I hope, for the sake of your happiness in this crazy world, that you do, too.
