This month’s etymology is a little unusual in form. Inspired from a recent conversation with a dear friend, I want to explore the word ‘undo’.
Undo has a relatively straightforward etymology. It is formed with the prefix un “opposite of” + do, which goes back to the PIE “to set, put, place.” Undo comes through the Old English undon, which has the beautiful and multivalent definition of “to unfasten by releasing from a fixed position; to cancel, discharge, abrogate, reverse what has been done, put back in a former condition; bring to ruin, destroy.”
It is as though the definition moves from a neutral to potentially positive definition through increasingly negative versions until it arrives at the most extreme: bring to ruin, or destroy. But if we take it from the top, it’s easy to come up with examples in which ‘release from a fixed position’ is a good thing. Quite literally, one can imagine chiropractic work or other body work that heals through this release. Emotionally, crying, confession, catharsis–all forms of positive release. In today’s political and intellectual climate, where safety of position seems to be located in the paradox of fixed positions that move (under cover of dark, when you aren’t watching) ever-further to the extreme, release from fixedness seems like a kind of utopian dream.
So why does the word also mean to cancel, to destroy? Based on the other definitions supplied, the connective tissue seems to be through interpretation of ‘reversal’ or ‘going back to a former condition’ as a negative thing. In general, we as a society tend to view backtracking as a nuisance, as a sign of not making progress, of, quite literally, regression. We see this played out across major issues and themes but also apply that logic to our small, daily battles. We make ambitious goals and then need to ‘reverse track’ and lower them. We get better at hard conversations, but then get triggered by something we didn’t think could trigger us so deeply, something that feels like it ‘undoes’ us beyond reason. We are forced to witness ourselves in ‘former’ primordial conditions.
But if we take a step back, a more nuanced, fully fleshed out version of ‘progress’ emerges. It’s not that we are foolish to want to progress. It’s not wrong that we set out to ‘do,’ that we are wired towards the act of creation. But this very act of creating, of doing, would be extraordinarily two dimensional without the presence of un-doing. Think about it: if the process of setting a goal was simply to set it and then inevitably and linearly move towards it, what would that feel like? What would the internal and external results be? Without the friction of un-doing, setting goals wouldn’t even be possible. They would be inevitable, like mile markers along the highway.
We derive meaning from the dance between do-ing and un-doing, from the conviction we feel one moment, the pride in a sense of completion, only to wake up to doubts, to something fallen out of place, to reversal. It is not only that progress exists in the relationship between the two, but that we literally could not experience progress as such without this duality.
So when my dear friend texts me late at night to ask “why is it easier in some ways to undo something, than to DO something”, I write this post as a response. Another simple way to answer it would be to say: the undoing is a part of the doing.