Happy new year, readers! I hope that the winter break (if you had one) was restorative for you and that you are ready to tackle a new Gregorian calendar year. I didn’t think that I would be ready in time – yet, here I am! But what am I talking about? I think I’m getting ahead of myself, so let me start a bit further back.
Pandemic phase one
I’m not referring to Ontario’s phased re-opening scheme or the first global wave of COVID-19. No, this is something a bit more personal. By phase one, I mean the period of time just after the pandemic started, during which I firmly believed that the pandemic’s work-from-home order could be beneficial. Specifically, for a while last year, I was certain I could become more productive during the lockdown. I have discussed how this kind of mindset led me down a rabbithole of excessive time management and counterproductive ‘productivity hacks’. Looking back, I can definitely see that my pace (and attitude) wasn’t sustainable.
I’m far from the only one, however, who felt or feels like this. In fact, the idea that we have to constantly be busy, be working, be getting ever closer to Our Dreams is fairly widespread. More than ever, the buzz and chatter about the need to get a side hustle or score an awesome secondary gig has been getting harder to ignore. So, even with all the information coming out about the effects of the pandemic on mental health, for a lot of people sitting and being still can feel sinful.
This is pretty much what Arendt predicted: in the modern age, people became accustomed to consuming things quickly, so a preference for fast and immediately consumable goods took hold. Beyond the material things, though, Arendt also talked about how people would change. She claimed that in our pursuit of perishable material things, the shape and contents of our desires, and our expectations for work and pace of work, would change too. Just as we want things and want them now, we also feel this pressure to work and work as much as possible.
So, are we doomed to the rat race?
Meditation and mindfulness
At the risk of sounding self-indulgent, I want to talk about my new year’s resolutions for 2021. First, as you may have guessed from the subheading title, I am going to try and meditate more. There have been countless studies that confirm the psychological and physiological benefits of meditation, but I think the pandemic has increased my appreciation for those benefits. Now seems like an amazing time for reduced anxiety, feelings of inner peace, and calmness. (There are actually many kinds of mindfulness practices, but I haven’t settled for just one. I’m hoping to try out a whole bunch!)
But wait, what about social isolation? As Arendt pondered in The Life of the Mind, “What are we ‘doing’ when we do nothing but think? Where are we when we, normally always surrounded by our fellow-men, are together with no one but ourselves?” (p. 8).
Perhaps some people will think that spending more time by myself during a province-wide lockdown, which was preceded by another months-long lockdown, is a bad idea. Why compound isolation with alone time? I don’t think that’s completely accurate. What I am hoping to get out of meditation is a sense of mental stillness and peace.
There’s been a lot going on in the world and with my own research in the past year. All of that has taken a mental and emotional toll. So, by taking some time to not think, I think I’ll be better able to socialize and be present with others. My mind won’t be going over my to-do list, for example, while someone tells me all about their Zoom-delivered holidays. (And elsewhere, Arendt did write that thinking was to mental life what breathing was for the corporeal life.)
Arendt on Thinking
It’s possible that Arendt has influenced my decision to mediate more. She never directly talked about practicing mindfulness, but her concept of thinking shares some similarities. Consider this passage from The Life of the Mind, which describes a particular historical understanding of thinking and indicates something important about thinking that Arendt wants to explore:
Thinking aims at and ends in contemplation, and contemplation is not an activity but a passivity; it is the point where mental activity comes to rest. According to traditions of Christian time, when philosophy had become the handmaiden of theology, thinking became meditation, and meditation again ended in contemplation, a kind of blessed state of the soul where the mind was no longer stretching out to know the truth but, in anticipation of a future state, received it temporarily in intuition (p. 6).
For Arendt, thinking was an activity that didn’t lead to truths (like the sciences), but instead led us to find and make meaning. So, thinking, like meditation, requires stopping; we can’t act and think at the same time. We aren’t trying to do something – but at the same time, being passive allows us to ‘extend’ our minds out into the world. We don’t think about nothing, but instead get a chance to examine and ensure that the pursuits we choose are ones we really value pursuing, that we aren’t chasing perishable goods or fruitless endeavors.
Action and Thinking
Arendt worried that thinking was being devalued for action in the modern age. As she writes in The Human Condition, which actually preceded The Life of the Mind, it wasn’t “that truth and knowledge were no longer important, but that they could be won only by ‘action’ and not by contemplation” (p. 290). To summarize what she writes later: we’ve grown to trust doing things and to distrust contemplation or observation; “[p]roductivity and creativity … were to become the highest ideals and even the idols of the modern age” (p. 296). This is perhaps most evident in our contemporary tendency to be busy and productive all of the time. (And hence serves as a good reminder to take some time for ourselves to not be productive and busy.)
Goal for the new year
Maybe meditating every day won’t have immensely profound effects, but stay tuned to find out! For 2021, my #AtHomeWithArendt related goal is to write a bit more personably, to make a kind of home with Arendt and you, readers.
Thinking about Arendt (no pun intended) for the last year or so has made me curious about the ways in which others can exert influence or partly constitute who we are. Arendt, in particular, has been an interesting case because she recognizes that who we are is partly a matter of who we are with, but she also writes about people needing to be in solitude sometimes in order to become who we want to be. So, for the next little while, I’m going to be looking at topics related to identity, isolation, and community. (In February, I take on social media presences!)