Monday Meditation, on refusal
Arriving on Tuesday…right on time
Dear Becoming Ones,
I am writing this Monday Meditation on a Tuesday.
On a bus from Cork to Dublin.
To catch a flight to Verona to be hosted for my last stop on my trip doing ethnographic research on belonging and freedom.
Perhaps that is fitting.
The calendar insists it is late. The algorithms insist I should have posted yesterday. The productivity gurus would remind me that consistency matters. Somewhere, buried beneath notifications and deadlines and the endless scroll of urgency, there is a voice whispering that I am already behind.
But behind whom?
Behind what?
The older I get, the more suspicious I become of acceleration.
We are living in a world that moves too quickly for the human soul. News arrives before we have processed yesterday’s grief. Outrage arrives before we have metabolized the last outrage. We are expected to respond, react, produce, perform, and optimize. We are told that our value lies in our output. We become managers of ourselves, measuring our worth through metrics that can never hold the complexity of a life.
years ago, I read a book that has stayed with me.
The philosopher Jenny Odell, in her book How to Do Nothing, reminds us that doing nothing is not laziness. It is not disengagement. It is not apathy. Doing nothing is a refusal. It is the practice of reclaiming our attention from the forces competing to own it.
Attention, after all, is a form of love.
What we attend to shapes us.
What we behold becomes part of us.
Ross Gay calls this the practice of beholding. Christina Sharpe teaches us to notice what survives in the wake. Baldwin reminds us that love is a rigorous act of attention. The contemplative traditions teach us that prayer begins not with speaking but with noticing.
Perhaps doing nothing is another way of saying: pay attention.
This morning, I sat with a cup of coffee longer than I normally would. No podcast. No music. No article to read. Just the coffee growing colder in the mug.
The window was open.
A bird landed on the fence.
The wind moved through the leaves.
Nothing happened.
And yet everything happened.
I noticed my breathing slow.
I noticed how tired I have been.
I noticed the grief I have been carrying.
I noticed the tenderness that still lives beneath the exhaustion.
In a world that demands constant movement, stillness can feel rebellious.
Byung-Chul Han argues that ours is no longer a society of external oppression but of self-exploitation. We become our own taskmasters. We internalize the demand to achieve. We push ourselves long after our bodies have asked us to stop.
The result is not freedom.
The result is exhaustion.
The desert mothers and fathers knew this long before social media. They fled the empire not because they hated the world but because they needed enough distance to hear themselves think. They understood that contemplation is not escape. It is preparation for another way of living.
The work of becoming human requires pauses.
The work of love requires pauses.
The work of freedom requires pauses.
And so, perhaps this week, the invitation is surprisingly simple.
Do less.
Not forever.
Just for a moment.
Sit on the porch.
Watch the river.
Listen to the rain.
Take a walk without headphones.
Pet the dog.
Hold the cat.
Stare at the moon.
Let yourself be a creature instead of a project.
The empire wants your attention because attention is power.
Give some of that attention back to yourself.
Give some of it to your neighbor.
Give some of it to the trees.
Give some of it to the silence.
Another possible world is not only built through action.
It is also built through attention.
And sometimes the most revolutionary thing we can do is nothing at all.
Poco a poco.
Paso a paso.
One breath.
One moment.
One act of attention at a time.
With care,
Roberto+
Photo by Peter Avery May 2026