Andrew Schroeder

In the last couple of months, I’ve worked incredibly hard at something that seems incredibly easy to do: doing nothing. Of course it is actually impossible to not do. Human beings are automated machines designed to engage stimuli. However, I’ve been training myself at the timeless art of uni-tasking. Screw multi-tasking and the little high that it has given me in the past. Does a person really need to complete the tasks simultaneously?

There is something incredibly beautiful about doing less and less. Instead of the clenched-jaw feeling of having too much going on, I find myself actually asking myself what I want to do.

There’s nothing more liberating that having that…

White Flower, 1960. Oil on canvas, 71 7/8 x 72 inches (182.6 x 182.9 cm). Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, Anonymous gift 63.1653. © 2007 Agnes Martin / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

As the slide into full-blown winter solidifies, the concepts of failure and reduction have taken over my thoughts. When one thinks of improvement, of being a “better person”, the tendency is to look at what we lack and emphasize what we can acquire. I feel like I have been caught in this quagmire of acquisition for way too long (perhaps roughly 27 years).

Reduction.
Simplification.
These are my new goals.
By all intensive logic, I want less.
I want to fail.

What does it mean to fail? According to Agnes Martin, failure is a state which exists only when one has exhausted all means and possible courses of action. Failure is a terminal condition–an end of possibilities.

Can one consider it a victory to stop doing something? To cease to acquire? To cease to care? Is that really failure? Or is the act of losing all choice, movement, and flexibility that elusive  apex of liberation I have been searing for?

Just a bit more Agnes and then I am going to call it a night, crawl into bed, and be blissfully unconscious.

“To progress in life you must give up the things you do not like. Give up doing the things that you do not like to do. You must find the things that you do like. The things that are acceptable to your mind.”

I really cannot think of anything I would like more.