Solo episode: Radical Acts of Quietude Hopscotch Chronicles Podcast with Dominic Vallée

Ever heard of Nigel Saunders? Let me guess that you haven’t. 
I mean, the guy runs a Youtube channel about making bonsai trees, a niche subject if there ever was one. Many times a week, the scruffy haired giant posts videos of himself working on his trees while wording out his thought process on his quest for miniaturization. Every branch he cuts, he tells you why. He’ll tell you when he’s hesitant, too. “If I cut this branch, that other one will get more sunlight but maybe it grows too vertically. So maybe that’s the one I should cut. Hard decision!” is the kind of thing you might hear him say. Personally, I relate to his content because some years ago, I did try my hand at bonsai making. Although I’m pretty much done with arboreal serial murdering (!), I still religiously watch the man often called the Bob Ross of tree dwarfing.
Now, this post isn’t about bonsai making per se. In fact, I’ve been triggered to write it because, as you might already know, I recently created a Twitter account. As I’m not entirely new to the platform (I did occasionally visit some years ago), I wasn’t really surprised by the tone and feel of the place. Plus, as unhinged as this platform can be, it is where a lot of the cool kids exchange and debate ideas, but this time, something immediately jumped to my face. As always, maybe now more than ever in fact, so-called rebels and counter-culture figures wage a war of words, which is, when stepping back, the normal way of doing things. Whether they realize it or not, most thought leaders are essentially behaving as perfect apostles of thinkism, that is, people who actively enact the belief that thinking, and maybe thinking only, is salutary to mankind. That said, I’m reminded of the cool kids of teenage years, the supposed outsiders who saw their binge drinking as rebellious acts…even if the most conformist, clean cut jocks partied just as hard. Different package and vibe, but same action.
To this day I believe that, maybe sadly, the truest of true rebels have often been the most silent. The solitary, the recluse, those who walk away from Omelas. The one’s who walk the line that can’t be talked. They probably wouldn’t think of themselves as rebels either. It’s generally the ones who just do their thing.
So, what does Nigel Saunders and bonsai making have to do with the twittersphere? Or, what does social media share with anything requiring focus, connectedness? On the surface, basically nothing. What is way more striking is that the commonly observed differences in their usage can be summarized using one word: apprehension, as in, “the grasp”. More precisely, the grasp of time, or rather, of “timeness”. Temporally speaking, tweets are rooted (no pun intended) in an immeasurable, ADHD inducing, torrent of ephemeral thoughts and events. “Centered actions”, be it pottery, cooking, origami, meditation, yoga, and of course bonsai making, are exclusive acts. The focus they require pushes away most of our shared reality, thus ― forcibly and artificially ― keeping the intellect from wandering.
Woah! Now at this point, maybe you’re a bit confused. Usually, in this kind of essay, people glorify an idea over the other, generally advocating for the most “calm” of the two. I mean, I got the beard and the “mystic” label after all. I should be pushing the belief that anything considered meditative is in essence superior to social media ramblings, right? Allow me to go all zen-like on your ass: is lightning ultimately superior to the breeze? I mean, really think/feel about it… archetypally, animistically even.
Two spirits, two colours. Fast flow, slow flow. In time, around time.
Still remains the very title of this essay, namely Radical Acts of Quietude. It does implicitly relate the idea of mindful, calm actions to at least a form of rebellion. All right, let’s get into it. 
Generally speaking, rebels aim to change things. They (re)act