Doing
Stuff
For
Travis, for L-slice, and for the Kid
I have been repeating myself of late, the same aphorism,
and I have possibly repeated it to everyone I know, and always in response to
excuses. Because, unlike many of my so-called friends and acquaintances, I am
always in favor of doing stuff – especially when the alternative is something
as dreary and predictable as not doing stuff. And my objection is inherently
ambiguous: there are few verbs less specific than “to do” and fewer nouns less
specific than “stuff.” Yet, when it comes to doing anything – and when I say
anything, I mean anything – most people
I have met would rather not. For some reason, the miasm of predictability
appeals irresistibly to Americans between the ages of eight and eighty, a
dimming but undiminished contentedness with the foreseen and foreknown.
(A friend of mine, Phoenix-born and Phoenix-dwelling,
has never seen the ocean, though it is only a relatively enjoyable eight hour
drive away. And this, this alone, is shocking to me. I remain, weeks after he
first revealed this to me, continually astonished. More troubling, however, is
his complete lack of concern with the situation. He is, amazingly, content to
remain in the desert, measuring out his life in coffee spoons of sun and sand.)
To be clear: “doing stuff” can mean literally any
activity. Literally. Hiking, for example, is a stuff to do, as is attending a
theme park, searching for buried treasure, or impulse driving to the beach. Trying
out a new restaurant is a stuff you can do; so is wandering around an
unexplored grid of streets or trying to hit a distant tree in the park with
tiny, tiny rocks. Grocery shopping is doing stuff – especially if you take
every opportunity to play grocery store bingo. Going to a coffee shop can be “doing
stuff”, even if the trip consists only of sitting around and doing the same
stuff you would have done if you had chosen to stay somewhere familiar and not “do
stuff.”
Because “doing stuff” is, or should be, the single most
successfully undertaken endeavor available to humanity as it exists across time
and space. Anyone with a pulse and a soul is capable of the activity. And
anyone with a pulse and a soul and a will has probably had the experience of
successfully becoming, if only for a short time, a doer of stuff. The requirements
to become a stuff-doer are unbelievably, undeniably, incontrovertibly lax. The
desire to do stuff is almost commensurate to the activity itself.
Which leaves me in a conundrum of weighty philosophical
and anthropological proportions: why (ohwhyohwhy) do so many friends, families,
and variously undefined acquaintances choose so very often to avoid the doing
of stuff? What appeals to them so strongly about not doing stuff instead?
Quite frankly, I am
starting to take the default response here quite personally. I have begun to
wonder if I am locked within some twisted version of the Cartesian dilemma,
playing a game in which there is no divine conspirator and society has individually
and unanimously determined that I shall have to pursue the art of doing stuff
all on my very own. I have begun to wonder if everyone else is out there doing
stuff with each other while I sit at home inventing stuff to do while
relentlessly and fruitlessly searching for someone to do it with. I have taken
to smelling myself every time a friend tells me they are “too busy” to do such
a simple stuff as walk to the part. I sprint to a mirror to check whether I
have gained some monstrous physical deformity. Do I still have a nose? I check
to see if my fly is unzipped. I grab a newspaper, searching for the recent
outbreak of catatonic apathy.
As might be
expected, my failure to persuade those I love that they should, in fact, do
stuff has increasingly formed in me a kind of apocalypticism. Of course the world
is coming to an end. How could it not, when the color is being drained from it breath
by repetitive-coma-inducing breath? when the world is caught up in its separate
selves, fractured, contained, and dissipating? when the notion of committing to
any activity sends thousands into paroxysms of existential uncertainty? My
internet history is chock-full of search results for lapsometers, mass
hypnotisms, spontaneous electron loss, and giant malevolent immobilized brains.
I keep waiting for the kids to jump-rope and bounce identical rubber balls on a
schedule. I wait for some to go outside with an object of their choice and do
any stuff at all.
Such failure to do
anything, such preference to stare at screens and sit on couches, such
inclination to kill time rather than treasure it – at some point in history,
such a mindset infected humanity, and the condition has spread, and the
symptoms are showing. The students I teach would rather play Temple Run on
their touch-screen gadgets than actually run in the park, would rather watch Phineas and Ferb than create and solve
their own mysteries, would rather talk to each other on the internet about the
stuff they would prefer not to do than find new and improved stuff to do
instead. They are eleven years old and made up of boundless potential, and they
have watched day in and day out as those past such potential choose to ignore
their very existence.
I am not saying that
the Nobel Peace Prize has become a joke because everyone chose to stay home and
watch TV the day their opportunity presented itself. Or maybe I am saying that.
But more importantly, I am contending that practice becomes perfect, and
practice at becoming sedentary makes for a perfectly sedentary human being. I
am saying that the de facto response
to doing stuff is rejection, and that this status quo is perhaps the single
most frightening tendency of our age – if it was not already in ages past.
So, with the same
impassioned impulse that Antione De St. Exupery warned children “watch out for
baobabs!”, I have unleashed my phrase upon the world. It is not a tautology,
though it appears one at first, because living is a habit and zombies
frightening; it is an acknowledgment of the supremacy of habit, and a warning
against the tendency that might undermine our world and split it into tiny jots
of merely filled space. It is an encouragement and a pronunciation of the human
potential, an apocalyptic yawp of desperation sounded from the rooftops of
apathy into the void of indecision. It is praise and it is folly, and it is
where I will leave you.
Once I tell you the secret, you must use it. Walk
outside, memorize a poem, visit a landmark, or fly paper airplanes from the
most obtruding object in sight. Use the secret to do more stuff. If you are not
sure what stuff to do, follow these simple steps:
1.
Choose an active verb. Almost any will suffice.
2.
Choose a noun. Again, almost any will suffice.
Some adverbs too.
3.
Place the verb (“verb”-ing) in front of the
noun.
4.
Execute.
Oh, and my irritating aphorism:
The secret to doing more stuff is . . . doing more stuff.
Love,
TCS
