In defense of going nowhere

Nowhere is Now-Here

We stood in the grass, an infinite moment or two—my bare feet on morning dew, Kitty Nova wearing her best fur—and watched the world, more ears than eyes, more nosing than knowing. I tune myself to her tail-conducted symphony, discordant human notes relaxing agenda, and together we go nowhere and arrive now-here.

Dave and I live in rural Oregon so birds of prey are a greater occurrence than speeding cars. This is why Nova and Otis are leash trained. This is why I spend what some might say “too much time” going nowhere in our yard. Walking loops, pausing, exploring this spot, no let’s go back to that spot, and sniffing, lots of sniffing. Otis and Nova go nowhere every time we walk, their contentment as infectious as the cat-borne parasite Toxoplasma gondii that keeps me slaving over them. As the adage goes, The mind is a wonderful servant but a terrible master. I submit to my masters. If I’m bound by agenda, this process of aimlessness might drive me to near madness. But I’ve learned, as with my dizzy brain, the best way to move about the world is with fluidity, unattached to expectation, responding to life over purposing life. I’m no expert at this but my symptoms offer a never-ending opportunity to practice this moment is enough, this moment is enough, senses finally freed into their natural state: a sublime act of devotion. In the final paragraph in author Janine Benyus’ book Biomimicry: Innovation Inspired by Nature, she writes, “We are surrounded by geniuses. They are everywhere with us breathing the same air, drinking the same round river of water, moving on limbs built from the same blood and bone. Learning from them will take only stillness on our part, a quieting of the voices of our own cleverness.” When I go nowhere, I meet the genius, and she leads the way.

Going nowhere requires a willingness to show up for how life presents itself, not how we think it should be—to wander slowly and very much at random, letting ourselves drop into the miracle of existence. Both originating from "wend" meaning "winding, bending,” wands were initially bendy sticks, and wandering is to walk in a non-straight fashion. So wave your magical wandering stick and go for a Sunday drive, sniff the world at 60mph. Get lost in the woods. Explore a new place without schedule, Google Map, or travel guide. Self described flâneur, or idle stroller, Henry James wrote in Italian Hours, published in 1909, that aimless strolling “served me to perfection and introduced me to the best things.” In an early courting ritual, Dave and I flâneured for photos, using pictures instead of words to communicate. We wandered a lot—sometimes together, sometimes apart—letting the world scribe our ever-evolving love letter. While we went nowhere, our hearts took us for a ride.

Much of creativity requires going nowhere—a willingness to transcend the space-time continuum to experiment, be curious, and free fall in the field of awareness where happy accidents guide invention. Twenty-thousand leagues of vector-less discovery, nowhere is where everything comes from. Like yin and yang, within going nowhere lives adventures untold—the limits on wonder only a lack of imagination—while going somewhere can often fail expectation and leave ennui and emptiness in its wake.

But humans are plagued with I don’t like where I am, I need to go somewhere. A sense that some other place or some other moment is better is part of the ego’s experience. We’ve developed entire belief systems to get somewhere else—a different relationship, a better body, better health, a new home, a new purpose, a heavenly afterlife all the greener grass of a heart’s desiring. Nova moves about for her patches of greener grass too, but each rapturous arrival a return to now-here as she devours her eden with bacchanalian fervor. (And then throws it up.)

Derogatorily “going nowhere” means someone is a lost cause, or isn’t following the rulebook for success and making no progress. A quick google search with the words GOING NOWHERE (I need to be sure I’m defending something worthy of defense) and the algorithm agrees, going nowhere is bad!

Help, I’m going nowhere in life!

What to do when you’re going nowhere.

Are you on the road to nowhere?

“Going nowhere fast” means a complete failure to achieve something, or anything, to move through the world without agenda or strategy. But is that so bad? Our culture equates going nowhere with being no one. We live in a society that believes action is required all the time. Fulfillment is out there and we must plot it out, one life hack after another, always reaching for the next goal, checking off the next bucket list item, taking the next step toward happiness, the next promise land of saving ourselves from ourselves. Each somewhere often standing in the way of true and lasting fulfillment.

Recently I visited my friend Dylan at his assisted care facility. A shining young man whose motor neurons fell into the ravages of ALS in 2018. I met Dylan late 2019 and he was already in a wheelchair, using an eye-tracking assisted communication device, with only his smile and the motion of his eyes left to communicate his love for this world. His body, for all intents and purposes, is a boulder, motionless within the spirals of season and occurrence. On this particular visit I brought some homemade calendula salve to rub his uprooted feet—patients with ALS, while they’re motor neurons are wiped out, their sensory neurons are as alive as the reaching branches of a giant tree. As I pressed my thumbs into what I expected to feel like corpselike matter, I was stunned by the force of vitality radiating from his body. This body, who hasn’t touched earth, stretched toward the sun, gripped the hand of a friend, or hurled itself through space in almost seven years, still felt as if he had just finished a flow-state jog through the Redwoods. Dylan travels nowhere except the short distance between his room and the assisted living center’s back porch to sit under a canopy of Doug Firs. We might call it stationary but certainty not inert. His stillness is dancing.

Nowhere isn’t no-place—Dylan, Nova and the trees attest. When agenda and goals bow at the altar of being, a different kind of place emerges. As Thomas Merton explains in Seeds of Contemplation, “…this is a country whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere.” I watch Nova’s delicate ear-fur play telephone with the landscape and I know she inhabits this kingdom of being. Nature doesn’t strategize, nature responds—with sublime intelligence I might add. And when we choose to go “now-here” we, too, are free to respond, yoked to the outside world through our senses-come-alive. Like the delicate pads of a dragonfly foot alighting on the surface of a pond, we arrive each time we hear before identifying, see beyond evaluating, touch without othering.

Tethered to my fur-gurus (furus!) with nowhere to go, I glimpse a return to perception before separation, before a here and a there and an I within that space to navigate it. Unbidden, I become cat, cat becomes tree, tree becomes sky, sky becomes I, a mending of life’s original rupture through rapt, devoted attention. Leashed to Love—our ultimate master—we are nobody going nowhere, infinitely now-here and of course, as my beloved kitties make it plainly clear, everywhere.

fur gurus...or can I simply call them furus?

In Defense of Beige

In Defense of Unanswered Prayers

In Defense of Crow’s Feet

In Defense of Weeds