The Last Word On Nothing

Last week: kind of a weird one. It was windy, which always makes more than the air feel unsettled. One afternoon a neighbor knocked on the door to say a skunk was stumbling around in the front yard in broad daylight. An hour earlier, one of my kids ran into a pole and went to urgent care.

That same morning, when I came into the kitchen, my husband said not to let the dog out. There was a baby bird that wasn’t doing well. Outside two scrub jays hovered nearby, hopping from a planter box to a chair to a fuzzy ball of feathers that had tucked itself next to a succulent. The night before that and two blocks over, a group of guys who came to steal a catalytic converter and went on to threaten the neighbors, who had to take cover in their house as the guys smashed in all their windows.

Should we do something? I asked my husband. This was about the bird. He shook his head.

I do not like doing nothing. I have trouble getting my hair cut because it seems like too long a time to sit there, doing nothing. If someone wants to go somewhere or do something, I get off the phone and sign up for the camp, I make reservations, I book plane tickets. This occasionally gets me in trouble; I also have a lot of split ends. Still, it feels productive.

I did not feel productive when there was a dying bird sitting outside the door and all I could do is peer through the glass. I did not feel productive when watching a skunk’s odd wander through the yard. I did not feel productive when my son held an ice pack over his eye and fell asleep on a beanbag chair. “I just read, because I couldn’t do anything else. I read all afternoon!” I wailed to my husband. When I heard that the cops came dismissed the neighbors’ broken glass and the shattered peace, at least I could feel angry, which doesn’t feel productive but feels like something.

With the bird, I paced in the other room for most of the morning, not really able to settle, not unlike the two adult scrub jays that kept hopping close, hopping away. I looked up what to do with birds. This scrub jay was a fledgling–part fluff but mostly feather–curled in a ball with a beak at one end, its parents patrolling the perimeter. Nothing: that’s what I was supposed to do. I couldn’t feel angry. Doing nothing was boring enough that even if I had been angry (maybe at the guilty-looking neighborhood cat?), there was too much nothing to stay angry for long.

Finally, I had to leave. Out in the world, I read about a woman who flew around the Earth in an airplane over long stretches the nothingness of ice and ocean. I read about nacre, or mother-of-pearl, a slow accumulation of layers of calcium carbonate and organic protein inside a mollusk. The thickness or thinness of each layer affects future layers so that, when these layers form a pearl, the pearl ends up being nearly symmetrical. Nacre’s strength and lightness—so light it feels almost like nothing–might inspire future protective gear. I wished that my neighbors’ windows were made of mother of pearl, that maybe we all were, that tiny layers of nothing could insulate us, too.

 When I came back, the bird was gone, no sign of left-behind feathers or blood. The scrub jays were still in the yard, but seemed less frantic. Once my son woke up, I told him that I thought the fledgling might have been all right after all. But still I have so many questions about when is the right time to do nothing, and the questions are piling up in layers, each one changed by what’s come before.  Will all this nothing make me stronger, too? Somewhere inside my book, the plane was still flying over the ice, miles of what looks like nothing, still getting closer to where it began.

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Image by Flickr user Tony Hisgett/Creative Commons license.