1029 | Learn Something From Nothing

On this episode of Behavior Gap Radio, Carl shares a quote from Mary Oliver that has been resonating with him deeply. "The dream of my life is to lie down by a slow river and stare at the light in the trees. To learn something by being nothing." 

Carl reflects on the simplicity and power of this idea, especially in our fast-paced lives filled with constant thoughts and distractions. Perhaps we can find our own version of "lying down by a slow river" to learn and grow? 

What is Behavior Gap Radio?

Greetings, Carl here.

This podcast is super simple, it's me wandering through the world noticing things about how to align my use of capital (time and money) with what is actually important to me.

-Carl

Carl: 00:00

Good morning. It's Carl. I hope you're having an amazing day. It gives me so much joy, the notes I've received about the last couple of episodes. So thank you.

Carl: 00:11

And for those of you, I've noticed or I've been told actually, that there's a lot of sharing of behavior upgrade going on on LinkedIn, and it just means the world to me. So thank you. I just wanted to share. Today is pretty quick because it's a quote from the ever challenging Mary Oliver and challenging in all the good ways. And so I want I don't want to take a lot of time because I just wanna drop this in your lap and let it work on you like it's been working on me.

Carl: 00:43

Here's Mary Oliver. The dream of my life is to lie down by a slow river and stare at the light in the trees. To learn something by being nothing. I mean, come on. To learn something by being nothing.

Carl: 01:15

The reason I wanna share that today is because I was on my morning walk in the mountains, and the light was beautiful. I I got up there. I started before dawn. It was basically just right before dawn. It was dark.

Carl: 01:33

I had a headlamp. I made my way up the mountain in about maybe a half an hour in. I was on this little little subridge so I could see the valley below and I could see the distant mountains in the, what would be the east, and the sun was coming up. So those mountains had started to light up a little bit. It still felt dark where I was, but looking over there I could see, you know, that early morning dark blue and then the slightly lighter blue is just amazing.

Carl: 02:10

And in the midst of all that, my head was going a 1000000 miles an hour. I was thinking about the things I had to do, and I was a little upset at but I I was about the direction that a different hiker took. They went we were on skis, and they went a different like, I wasn't really upset, but I was having thoughts about it. Like, oh, I wonder. And people other people were out there, and so, you know, there's competitive thoughts, and then there's, like, what am I gonna do at work, and how am I gonna make this work?

Carl: 02:39

And I just had to keep reminding myself that it's so counterintuitive what Mary Oliver is pointing to, but so many of the poets and the philosophers and the prophets point to it to learn something by being nothing and how much crisper cleaner our relationships would be And as we've talked about last couple day, our relationship with money would be cleaner if it wasn't always filled with a million thoughts about the stories we tell. So I wonder if there isn't a place that your version of lying down by a slow river and staring at the light in the trees so that you could learn something by being nothing. Let that one work on you for a little bit. Cheers my friends.