The Upper West Side’s Greatest Amenity: Nothing

By Yvonne Vávra

I had a lot to do the other day but decided it was better to do nothing instead. I wasn’t trying to be a rebel. I just know from experience that sometimes “a lot” only feels like “a lot” because too many thoughts have been piled on top of it, and too many feelings have crept into the spaces between, until the whole thing becomes a psychological eel: squirmy, elusive, impossible to get hold of.

Taking a break and doing nothing helps strip it back to a naked, no-nonsense to-do list. Not that I’d want to sell this as a productivity hack. The feeling that we have to be productive all the time is exactly what messes us up in the first place.

But we’ll get back to that.

So there I was, doing sweet nothing on the lawn near the 81st Street entrance to Central Park. Naturally, I immediately got busy observing a group of boys basking on a rock in complete stillness, like turtles. My brain got very excited. So many thoughts to have. They seemed to know each other, yet gave each other space. They also looked a little spaced out, each absorbed in his own world through his phone, far away from this one, far away from one another.

Now, we can’t exactly call that doing nothing, but it probably amounted to something close enough. I was hardly doing nothing myself, so invested was I in my little Turtle Rock scene. The mind is a curious thing — it’s only natural to struggle to keep it in nothing mode, especially with these fantastic amusement parks we carry in our pockets. Only the strongest among us can resist the way attention capitalism grabs us by the brain. The boys had chosen stillness, and perhaps letting the mind drift away counts as its own version of it.

What I loved about the scene on the rock was that it was possible. The boys felt safe to space out for a while, knowing that nobody would bother them or shoo them away. This public rock was theirs for the time being simply because they were there.

We often judge a neighborhood by its busy moments: the fun stuff to do, the great restaurants, the packed cafés, the street fairs, the lists of best this and best that. But there is another measure: Does a neighborhood allow people to sit down somewhere and claim space for nothing in particular? Do people feel comfortable enough to lie down in the grass and close their eyes? Does it let people simply be, without anyone wondering what they’re up to?

The Upper West Side checks these boxes. While there are plenty of places in the parks and beyond designed for activity and consumption, there is also enough public space that doesn’t ask us to purchase, produce, perform, or participate. We have the luxury of room to occupy without having to justify our presence or prove we belong. And every human being deserves the freedom to be exactly that: a human, with nothing to do but be.

Walking around the neighborhood this week, I was amazed by all the hanging out going on. Everyone and their mom seemed to be sitting around, studying the distance. We hear a lot about crime this, decline that, and the feeling that we’re no longer safe. But the streets tell a different story. The Upper West Side’s sense of ease is clearly visible in the way people linger outside, looking comfortable and relaxed.

The neighborhood encourages it. In fact, it’s so generous with its gazillion benches, pedestrian plazas, and public seating areas that it almost seems a little pushy, like it’s asking: Hey, you still good? Need a moment? Sure you wanna move on?

No, actually, we’re not. That’s something we could choose to answer more often. We’ve become so used to measuring our days by what we got done, but the Upper West Side is winking at us from every bench, inviting us to leave the hustle hustling for a while and do sweet nothing with her instead. She couldn’t lay it on any thicker. Maybe it’s time we took the hint.

And then, of course, we get back to the list. Oh yes, mine was still there when I got home. But it had stopped doing eel things, and I got a grip on it.

Yvonne Vávra is a magazine writer and author of the German book 111 Gründe New York zu lieben (111 Reasons to Love New York). Born a Berliner but an aspiring Upper West Sider since the 1990s (thanks, Nora Ephron), she came to New York in 2010 and seven years later made her Upper West Side dreams come true. She’s been obsessively walking the neighborhood ever since.

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