Literally just do things

less watching, more doing

Following in the Example of the Gods (Henryk Siemiradzki, 1899)

There is a common rule in writing and I think it is a good one: say the obvious thing.

The most important ideas are almost always obvious. Love your neighbour, tell the truth, take care of your family, try to be present, treat others as you’d like to be treated. It’s easy to overlook these ideas because they sound ordinary and boring. They lack the gloss of complexity. From repetition alone, these truisms begin to feel like banal platitudes, things you tell children. We become blind to their life or death significance.

Instead of saying the boring, ordinary, important thing, that risks making them look naive or cliche or sentimental or sappy, writers like to say the witty, sophisticated thing that mostly goes over everyone’s head (including their own). They don’t want to write clear and hard about what hurts because that would require a confrontation of self which is always a kind of crucifixion, a willingness to die to move the reader.

In attempting to sound intelligent, they become obscure.

The challenge for any writer is to communicate the boring thing in an unboring way. To breathe new life into an old truth. To fracture reality in a strange, surprising pattern and make it feel like voltage in the soul, an electric current both applied and received from within. To talk in the dialect of their era about how to be a human being among other human beings and remain one until you die. The challenge is to write in a way that pierces people with the poetry of what is right in front of their eyes.

Anyway, this whole tangent is an indecently long introduction to an ordinary, boring idea I happen to think is very important: doing things. As in, losing the impulse of spectatorship and literally just doing things.

My great grandmother used to say that “idle hands make the devil’s work”. While we never had a solid conversation about her views on the demonic, I learned from a young age that vice often enters our lives through the door of idleness, inactivity, sitting on our hands. Passivity is a kind of sludge we can get stuck in as we wait for real life to start.

One of the biggest fallacies of the modern world, made fatal by the Information Age, is that learning must precede doing. That one must first acquire all the facts, figure it out, watch another act, before they are equipped to try themselves. As a result, many have become intoxicated by inertia, blinded by a veil of permission that only exists in imagination.

Here’s the thing: to be a human being is to feel a little afraid and insecure and somewhat inadequate to face the life that is before us. Sometimes it can feel like we were promised to walk on water but all we do is sink.

Yet the deeply held, unspoken belief that we are alone in these feelings, that we are somehow different from everyone else, only grows stronger as we watch others do the things we wish we were doing. As our passivity becomes a form of quiet captivity, spending years feeling like we’re stuck in a jail cell, only to realize one day that the door was never locked.

~~~

Don’t get me wrong. It is not easy to learn how to handle being sentenced to freedom.

My point here is simpler, naive in its optimism: Life does not have to mean mostly waiting for life, or remembering it. Watching TV or scrolling on social media do not have to be your hobbies. Besides, most things are not as complicated as they seem.

The summer I spent living off-grid in Newfoundland with friends, we spent two months finishing a cabin. It had a floor, a plywood roof, and walls, but not much else. We built a deck, stairs, put in windows, a proper door, installed a steel roof, batons (or “batmans” if you are in a particularly July mood), as well as an outdoor shower with a French drain. Now, none of it was exactly level and nothing was perfectly square. The door got stuck sometimes, the deck had a subtle step down (only deadly for the unobservant man), some batmans were slightly crooked, and one window we had to tear out and redo three times. This could be called “hack” carpentry, and it somewhat was, but that is a term so-called experts use to defend their pride. By the end of the summer, we had a fully functioning almost airbnb-able cabin, adorned with love and care and sweat and a few quirks that made it all the more endearing, and had a ton of fun doing it.

I am terribly fond of the earnest attempt to make something; to add a tangible fact to reality, however imperfect.

When I returned home to Ontario, I decided to build a shed at my cottage where firewood could sleep over the winter. I had little carpentry experience, but with a Pinterest board, a hand-drawn design, a few phone calls to a local lumber store, and some basic tools, I had enough. A few reversible mistakes were made, as well as a few less reversible mistakes (for some reason, I decided shingling was intuitive), but the woodshed stood upright and kept the rain out and happily housed half a bushcord of firewood.

It is a remarkable moment in maturity when you realize the world is a malleable place. A place full of opportunities to exert effort for meaningful, sometimes delightful rewards.

But I probably wouldn’t have attempted building a woodshed on my own if I hadn’t seen it was possible. Maybe another lesson here is: if you want to do things, spend time around people who do things. People who are high agency have a strange way of bending reality around them. They tend to teach others the same¹.

This is one of my favourite traits, I think. People who are attuned to the world and to themselves and do interesting things out of that attunement, no matter how strange or hard it is to explain. People who take their curiosity seriously and pursue passions that are so non-consensus, so far off-script, they can only come from a genuine place.

I’ve followed the same “learn-by-doing” approach for woodcarving, photography, gardening, embroidery, cooking, BJJ, archery, hunting, backcountry hiking (almost to my demise). Instead of searching for instructions, I started with creation. Last winter, a friend stopped by as I was carving a kitchen spoon. Surprised, he asked how I learned. “I just picked up a piece of wood and a knife and tried to make something that looked like a spoon.” My first few creations were goofy, almost unusable, but with each attempt I improved at making something spoon-like.

I don’t care to be agentic. I’m not even sure I know what that means. I just want to be in motion, to make attempts, to furnish the room of my mind with adventures taken, reap a harvest of sweet memories, stories I can tell my children.

Or phrased negatively, I do not want to be like Sartre and live a toothless life, waiting, reserving myself for someday, ready to take a bite only to find out my teeth are gone.

The point I’m trying to make is you can literally just do things and derive great enjoyment from it and perhaps make something useful and beautiful in the process, while learning more about the craft and your own character than if you spent the equivalent amount of time watching others or gathering facts. I don’t think I’ll ever be an excellent photographer, but I don’t need to be. I don’t care to be excellent, or even that good. But that also doesn’t mean I can’t get better with patience and time. I may dive into the textbook technicalities in the future, seek out non-empirical information, but I can also choose to simply enjoy being an amateur. Regardless, it is a choice.

The spirit of the amateur is nothing more and nothing less than a willingness to try, to make attempts, without caring too much about short-term results or looking foolish; labouring out of love but not needing to fashion an identity from it.

If no one is around, you can always do things alone. There is a kind of quiet luxury to hiking or perusing through a farmer’s market on a sunny Saturday morning by yourself, far superior to scheduling six weeks in advance or waiting around for someone to be available. Instead: “I am going for a sunset swim on Tuesday at the Elora gorge. If you want to come, meet at Seven Shores cafe at 7pm”. Surprisingly, open invites get more people to come.

As you do things, you grow in stature. As you take action, you build a stack of proof you’re the sort of person you want to be. Abstract principles are transformed into character only through the crucible of action. For instance, by doing hard things and courting failure, you build confidence. This is because confidence isn’t a byproduct of belief but comes when you do the hard or scary or uncomfortable thing enough times that your nervous system stops flooding with fear. Almost regardless of result.

We are most alive in motion. The devil hates a moving target.

~~~

It is a kind of skill to let your imagination roam, seek out some of the inexhaustible fruit that is available for your labour.

I believe that dreaming is a habit required for good health. It’s a sign of intention, a life that isn’t just accidental, a result of forces acting on you. One must adorn their mind with a positive vision for the future they find appealing, that calls them forward and gives them a reason to get out of bed in the morning. The danger is when dreams become an abstract thing. When the dreamer forgets that achievement is always an accumulation of human sweat and to turn dreams into tangible facts, the soul must make demands of the body².

I aspire to talk often of my dreams and desires, undaunted by their size or scope. To be unafraid of wanting things, asking for them, even if I fall short. There is sometimes a discomfort that arises when I see the distance between where I am now and where I want to be someday. But I remind myself there are ways I can live a bit of my dreams now, even in small ways. One must choose to follow the breadcrumbs.

While writing five different drafts of this essay, anytime I approached what felt capital-t True, I seemed to dissolve into sappy platitudes that made me roll my eyes after writing them, how much beauty this world is capable of, how life becomes alive when we act upon it, how much there is to learn and to do in this life, how it’s worth it to try.

But the truth is, you never know what can happen once you set foot outside your front door. You don’t literally have to step through a door. But you do have to gently and continually reach for the wrists of being to feel the pulse beneath the skin.

Meet you down in the garden,

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1. In other words: They break our models of reality by showing what it is possible to do in an afternoon.

2. There is no perfection here. We are all haunted by the ghost of wholeness. Some people exercise an almost supernatural degree of agency in their career but are apathetic in romantic relationships and blame their unhappiness on others. We all have well-lit rooms within where we dream vigorously and take action, and dim corners where we languish in passivity. Perhaps what it means to be in development: to carry a candle, unafraid to stare at the cob-webbed corners of the soul. To keep vigil.