how a snail has more purpose than I do
Their movement, though slow, seem driven by a cause leagues bigger than what little I know of this world.
While hanging laundry on the clothesline some weeks ago, my eyes caught sight of the brown, coiled gastropod shell of a snail.
I crouched next to the drain watching it move while it left a trail of mucus in its wake. The snail reminded me of oceans and jellyfish for some reason, and then I started thinking of luminous jellyfish shaped like bells, their movements ominous but driven by an ancient purpose I’m not privy to. Looking at snails and thinking of jellyfish, I couldn’t help but feel subjected to a sense of mockery. How sovereign they were. As though the way I had been living was wrong. Beautiful creatures, as if telling me to adopt a purpose.
The snail at my feet crawled on.
How separated that creature was from the human realm, but with seemingly more sovereignty over its own self than I do.
I watched the snail move inch by inch. I appreciated the fact that I was distracted mid-chore, because it meant I was able to stay present for a while in the midst of extreme productivity and attention theft that plagued me this past year, not just in action but in thinking. But of course, the guilt was there, in the back of my mind. The guilt of doing nothing, because after all, doing nothing was—is— a waste of time, and morally repulsive. At least, that’s how it feels.
I’ve been thinking a lot about purpose, and the demonization of relaxing, and how the calm and bucolic has become both a luxury and sin— instead of a right. Because the times I’ve been closest to grasping a thorough comprehension of my purpose on this Earth were times I was still and calm.
But I didn’t have much of that. Real stillness.
Today, everyone’s expected to be in a constant state of growth and improvement. We're encouraged to strive for more— more success, more wealth, more achievements, more and more. We're told that we should always be aiming for better versions of ourselves, and that anything less is simply not enough. The relentless pursuit of growth seems to be the manner of living everyone should adopt, lest they’re considered lacking motives or morals. But sometimes, the most courageous and fulfilling choice is to be present and grateful for what we have, rather than constantly chasing after what we don't. Because all this exhaustion—and to whose benefit? Because for me, the ‘benefits’ that I receive from working terribly hard and worrying myself to death only take the form of a benefit because of the way I’ve been taught to live. Which is out of fear. We live out of fear—fear of poverty, fear of instability— and we work to evade those fears, because if we don’t work ourselves to the bone, there is no way for us to live dignified lives.
Many can relate to oscillating between crippling financial anxiety and the desire to give one’s self a dignified meal, or an overdue break. And sometimes, the awareness of how dehumanizing it feels having to pay to eat, having to fight to be treated with respect, having to justify rest— it simply results in the loss of appetite, in dissociating from the act of resting, in forgoing being treated with dignity, and the loop goes on and on. Worse, we’re filled by guilt, and shame, and the loop goes on.
A snail doesn’t have to think of these things.
Financial poverty isn’t the only type of poverty that exists. Time poverty is very much a thing and is even more insidious. Money doesn’t just buy you resources and opportunities, but also the time to delve into such opportunities and explore more things. Not only are people—especially women and primary caretakers— are already victims of time poverty since they/we are usually responsible for doing unpaid labour at home, but our ‘free’ time, too, is being occupied by topics and thoughts that infiltrate the seams of our minds like a gas leak—the migraine-inducing capitalist occupation of our time and thoughts. This trend, that drama, this news, that new product.
God, I don’t care for most of these things that other people do, yet I’m still not spared from this constant occupation of my time and thoughts. And it makes it hard to feel quiet. And I need to be quiet to think. Only when it’s quiet can I entertain the commotion in my head, only then can my brain to take a minute to appreciate the peaceful, independent nature of a snail on its way.
As I see it, thinking is an art, while understanding is a skill. Understanding (to me) works like this: from conversations and experiences, I can build pathways—steps—to coming to a certain conclusion, like a form of diagnostics. We utilize resources to construct an understanding. But thought processes, and how they come to be, are still largely shielded from my awareness. Thus, thinking is an art. It’s exploratory. It comes when it comes. And it can come, with more ease, when I spend time, now and then, doing nothing.
I love doing nothing, as in going on walks and being quiet, and I love doing it with the people I care about. But how the world works, it’s even hard to do nothing with people I love, for fear they’d misunderstand my intentional idleness for laziness and dislike me for it. I want to do nothing with you. But what if you’re repulsed by it? Yes, we’d expect the people we love to be tolerant and understanding of our intentions, but nobody can maintain that kind of constant care for us in their heads while constantly re-learning how their own personal values have been shaped by what the culture around them values.
It makes me sad. I’d love to share a little bit of stillness and quiet with my friends. But sometimes I can’t, because to them, doing nothing means they’re losing time.
“One thing I have learned about attention is that certain forms of it are contagious. When you spend enough time with someone who pays close attention to something (if you were hanging out with me, it would be birds), you inevitably start to pay attention to some of the same things. I’ve also learned that patterns of attention—what we choose to notice and what we do not—are how we render reality for ourselves, and thus have a direct bearing on what we feel is possible at any given time. These aspects, taken together, suggest to me the revolutionary potential of taking back our attention. To capitalist logic, which thrives on myopia and dissatisfaction, there may indeed be something dangerous about something as pedestrian as doing nothing: escaping laterally toward each other, we might just find that everything we wanted is already here.”
—Jenny Odell.
Aware of today’s relentless pursuit of growth, and being an unwilling participant (yet competitive nonetheless in my pursuit), I tried turning to my faith in search of stillness and purpose. It did help me be quiet— morning practices like meditating or simply sitting on a prayer mat and counting my blessings. A key takeaway I got from looking at this problem from a faith-oriented point of view, was that personal development is not an end goal, and not something to be ‘achieved’. I’m already growing via the cumulative effect of my doings and reworking of my thoughts. And it is alright if I stop, it is not inherently morally wrong, and I can always pick it up again.
Even months, or even years, later.
You see, I’m trying to be slower and kinder because I am already dead. Dead like how Mufasa has died before The Lion King even starts, dead like how Icarus had fallen before he had wings, dead like how Mahsuri had been stabbed before she was accused of anything. My death, like theirs, has already happened. I am a walking ending. It’s just a matter of a few more flipped pages.
I am already dead, so what do I want to fill my life with, until I reach my ending? My ending, that has already happened?
Because when I think of it this way, my goals seem so, so empty.
I don’t want to be another cog in the machine, but I still have dreams I want to achieve. And I should achieve them before I fully realize these dreams I have… aren’t entirely mine. I’m fully aware they’re wishes and plans I’ve picked up along the way that I think would gift me a sense of fulfilment, however little.
Dreams I built from other people’s expectations. Constellations I made up from other people’s stars.
I still have more to learn. I’m still looking into snails, birds, and rivers to understand my purpose. But I’ll try to do more of nothing. I’ll try to include more pockets of nothing and silence and stillness into my life. I will pause every time I see a snail. Which, in wet humid Malaysia, is quite often. Good.
Maybe one day I’ll do enough nothings that my life becomes mine.
Reads related to these reflections :
Quiet Grass, Green Stone by Dean Young (poem)
The Myth of the Lazy Native: A Study of the Image of the Malays, Filipinos, and Javanese from the 16th to the 20th Century and Its Function in the Ideology of Colonial Capitalism by Syed Hussein Alatas
How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy by Jenny Odell