A Book Report About a Book Report
Guest Post: Katie Donnelly on Doing Nothing Through a Pandemic
One of the reasons—maybe the biggest reason—I keep going with the book report project is that it connects me to people in a totally different way—more intimate, more interesting. This happened with Katie Donnelly, a colleague who read my book report and then wrote, printed, and bound her own in response—transforming this project into something else entirely. These days I care about my project not so much because it connects me to me, but rather because it connects me to you. In this case, to Katie, who I think you’ll agree is just lovely.
So meet Katie Donnelly, through some excerpts (shared with her permission) from her response1 to The Emergency Was Curiosity.
Christie,
Hi. Hello. I’m so glad we met (or re-met?) and uncovered our parallel lives and are finding new ways of joyful collaboration and connection in a sometimes very terrifying world. When I started writing this, I had no idea what I would write or how open I would be or what form it would take. It’s been an interesting journey, to see all the things I had to say but didn’t have a place to say them until now. So thank you for that.
The number one thing that stuck out to me most from the book report was the question, “What would you make if you weren’t trying to be understood by anyone else?”
This is one of the fundamental questions of the time we live in. At least for me it is. As you know, I have trouble writing anything at all now because I don’t trust the platforms and I don’t know who the audience is and I don’t want to twist myself into something that makes sense for them and then figure it all out again once we’ve all moved to a new system.
I don’t even journal, because when I do I imagine my daughter reading what I wrote when I’m dead and then I find myself writing through her (imagined, older) eyes and then I subtly contort myself into the role of Wise Dead Mom. But it feels pointless to write for nothing and no one but myself. Why would I do that, when I could be talking to a dear friend or doing the endless maintenance work of cleaning or earning money to support my family or eating a delicious sandwich in the sunshine? So I am writing this response to you, directly. I think the voice that is coming through is my actual voice. I hope so, anyway. I hope you like it.
***
How to Do Nothing
I first read How to Do Nothing in the summer of 2020, while sheltering in place at my parents’ house in the woods of eastern Connecticut, after spending several fraught, dystopian months in an 800some-square-foot Philadelphia row home with only a concrete patio for outdoor space and a very spirited three-year-old who couldn’t understand why she was suddenly not allowed to see anyone or touch anything. The book was getting quite a bit of buzz at the time, especially among thoughtful, type-A professionals who were confronted with slowing down for the first time ever.
I can see why it resonated with so many people, but it didn’t really resonate with me, personally. The thing is, I am already EXCELLENT at doing nothing. I have never fit in with the rhythms of work or capitalism. I don’t care about productivity, AT ALL. I always try to fill my days with meaningful, human connection. I have never prioritized work over relationships. I try to shrink work into the smallest corners of my days unless it’s something or with someone I am especially passionate about, in which case I let it expand as big as it needs to be. Not to brag but I am probably better at doing nothing than Jenny Odell, even, because I would never do anything as ambitious as write an entire book!
The weird thing is, though, I probably am one of the most productive people I know. I can crank out a week’s worth of work in a few hours, if I have the freedom to pace things out the way I work best. I need to spend the majority of my time taking long walks and long showers and going to movies in the middle of the day and letting all the thoughts marinate in my head until I hit the moment where it all comes together and then I am extremely prolific in a fairly effortless way. But, like everyone else, I work in a structure that doesn’t allow for me to work that way. I spend much more time and energy pretending that I can work like a regular person than I do actually working. I wonder what it would look like if everyone could work according to their own natural rhythms?
It’s not just how I work, or don’t work. I can’t even take regular-person vacations. I need like three weeks to sink into a place and figure out where my grocery store and coffee shop are, and just kind of absorb the local culture through osmosis. I don’t mean this to brag about how great I am at being under scheduled and not caring about the capitalist machine. I WISH I was more structured and ambitious! I imagine most of the people I ever worked with wished I was as well! Sometimes I can feel (or imagine, more likely) their disappointment and the disappointment of every teacher I ever had who thought I was really going places.
And even though I try to live by my own values and my own work style, it’s not like I know how to relax or anything. I am generally wracked with anxiety and frustration. I feel like I am failing my daughter, and setting her up to fail, by not being driven more by money, which would give her more resources and opportunities. One of the main internal struggles of my life is how little I care about conventional systems and structures and refuse to play by their hoop-jumping rules, and how frustrated I am that the conventional rewards of participating in those systems haven’t just fallen in my lap anyway.
***
Katie’s response: Even though sometimes I can be harsh and bitter and jealous, when I read about all of the classes you took during the pandemic I didn’t feel jealous, not a single bit. I felt so happy for you that you got to explore all that. I felt admiration for you and for your spirit of being completely willing to place yourself in the position of learner rather than expert. That is so exceedingly rare, you know? It’s vulnerable. Most people will do anything to avoid doing that. I think it’s amazing that you did all that. I feel tender towards you, too. I feel tender towards you and myself and all of us who are trying.
(This is Christie again). My whole project started because I wanted to talk about Jenny's book with people, but I couldn't really figure out how to casually drop into conversation, "How are you wrestling with the attention economy?" I want to be in conversation with people who are wondering about the same things, and asking questions of their own. Which in turn helps me to figure out answers to my own questions, gives me new questions to think about. It’s all so different from whatever I am fed by the algorithms that are allegedly “for me”, than the “big ideas” that are forced on me by people who look, act, think nothing like me, or maybe more accurately, who seem a little like me but then turn out not to be. Katie’s response has been a gift, and it’s why I keep going with this thing.
Katie and I just spent the last week in the Azores, at what might be called a work retreat but resembled no work retreat I’ve ever been on. During a Show & Tell session in the schedule, she read her words out loud in a small room of people. It’s so hard to convey what Katie’s words (inspired by my words which were inspired by Jenny’s words) did to that room. As I’ve been working to schedule and produce and execute events for the little book tour I’m going on, I realized this is all I ever want to be doing—to be in conversation and community with small groups of people, present to our collective trying.
Are you interested in more of Katie’s beautiful writing? If you’d like to read Katie’s full book report, drop her a line, and she’ll send it to you.