Indolence
I grew up at a time dominated by the Protestant work ethic. It was simple: work hard, be frugal and be disciplined. Work was for the benefit of your family and the broader society, waste was bad, and to be a good member of the community you lived by these precepts. It is said the Jesuits claimed that if they could have a child to the age of seven, they had him for life (yes, I know, Protestants aren’t Jesuits). Certainly, I was imbued with Calvinistic virtues as I grew up, especially by my mother who made sure industriousness and thrift were well established at an early age: to my surprise, they’re still there. As for indolence, if it ever came up in conversation it was uttered with something close to embarrassment. It was sinful and self-indulgent. For years I knew it was out there, ready to suck me into a swamp full of morally dangerous quicksand.
As I grew up, I found my mother’s list of virtues was growing. Initially, and most important, I discovered if you worked hard, you could enjoy some (but not too much) time off, especially at the weekend. Of course, there were tasks to be completed in the evenings or on a Sunday, but it was acceptable to slot in some non-work time, for reading comics, or, once we had one, for watching television (only for a short period of time in our household). A little later, I learned if I laboured away as an adult, I would be rewarded with a good, comfortable retirement. When my dad retired and I saw him digging away in the garden, I wasn’t quite clear about the comfortable part, but I reconciled what I observed with understanding working hard brought you a pension, money for your old age. Eschewing his comfort, perhaps my dad just liked gardening?
Those values were further reinforced when I started a position at Shell. I had an unexpected phone call from the UK (expensive back then). It was my parents: “You’ve got a job with Shell! Stick at it, and in thirty years you’ll be able to retire on a good pension”. I knew it was good advice, but I failed to heed it, and left the company after three years. The miserable payout I got at the time was largely wasted on shopping. With my dad’s scientific bent in my head, I decided to acquire one of those new-fangled video-recorders, and my research showed the Sony U-matic system was superior. Yup, it was, but I’d wasted my meagre savings as VHS swept the board!
However, as a child, I had acquired a horrifying fascination with doing nothing. I was saved by my time being filled with school, after school activities, and reading good books. I was tempted to think the grass might be greener on the other side, but I was determined not to cross! Young, naïve, I was truly scared: if I didn’t work, I’d have no money, become a tramp, a parasite and an embarrassment to my family. But there it was, doing nothing remained seductively appealing.
Part of the trouble came from books I read, especially those I loved. There was that somewhat overweight, lovable bear, Winnie-the-Pooh, whose whole life seemed to be based on masses of indolence, lots of eating, and a little activity. How could you not love a bear with this response to a question? “‘Honey or condensed milk with your bread?’ He was so excited that he said, ‘Both,’ and then, so as not to seem greedy, he added, ‘but don’t bother about the bread, please.’” His wisdom was dangerously attractive. “Don’t underestimate the value of doing nothing.” “Sometimes, if you stand on the bottom rail of a bridge and lean over to watch the river slipping slowly away beneath you, you will suddenly know everything there is to be known.” “Rivers know this: there is no hurry. We shall get there some day.” What a profoundly wise bear.
Quintessentially, the Pooh philosophy (or Milne’s I suppose, although Pooh exemplified it in the books), was caught in this telling exchange:
“What I like doing best is Nothing.”
“How do you do Nothing,” asked Pooh after he had wondered for a long time.
“Well, it’s when people call out at you just as you’re going off to do it, ‘What are you going to do, Christopher Robin?’ and you say, ‘Oh, Nothing,’ and then you go and do it.
It means just going along, listening to all the things you can’t hear, and not bothering.”
“Oh!” said Pooh.” [i]
There was something about that lazy, sunny day image that was enticing. I’d grasped, intuitively, this wasn’t the same as reading or some other kind of entertainment. This was ‘Nothing’. When I read Wind in the Willows, I saw Rat understood:
‘Nice? It’s the ONLY thing,’ said the Water Rat solemnly, as he leant forward for his stroke. ‘Believe me, my young friend, there is NOTHING–absolutely nothing–half so much worth doing as simply messing about in boats. Simply messing,’ he went on dreamily: ‘messing–about–in–boats; messing—-’ ‘Look ahead, Rat!’ cried the Mole suddenly. It was too late. The boat struck the bank full tilt. The dreamer, the joyous oarsman, lay on his back at the bottom of the boat, his heels in the air.
‘–about in boats–or WITH boats,’ the Rat went on composedly, picking himself up with a pleasant laugh. ‘In or out of ‘em, it doesn’t matter. Nothing seems really to matter, that’s the charm of it. Whether you get away, or whether you don’t; whether you arrive at your destination or whether you reach somewhere else, or whether you never get anywhere at all, you’re always busy, and you never do anything in particular; and when you’ve done it there’s always something else to do, and you can do it if you like, but you’d much better not. Look here! If you’ve really nothing else on hand this morning, supposing we drop down the river together, and have a long day of it?’ [ii]
Not every children’s author was extolling a life of indolence. Lewis Carroll used ‘lazing about’ as an excuse to launch an improbable (and later, we came to realise, dream-like) adventure: “Alice was beginning to get very tired of sitting by her sister on the bank, and of having nothing to do: once or twice she had peeped into the book her sister was reading, but it had no pictures or conversations in it, ‘and what is the use of a book,’ thought Alice ‘without pictures or conversations?’ So she was considering in her own mind (as well as she could, for the hot day made her feel very sleepy and stupid), whether the pleasure of making a daisy-chain would be worth the trouble of getting up and picking the daisies, when suddenly a White Rabbit with pink eyes ran close by her.” [iii] Writers like Carroll were warning us, indolence could lead to danger!
Despite my fascination, parents and school had scared me off from doing nothing, and so began a life of study and employment. Here I am now, no longer working full-time, and, you might think, able to enjoy that ‘doing nothing’ I’d dreamt about. I do have a considerable amount of ‘free’ time, not allocated and controlled by an employer, but it has only been in the last couple of years that I have looked around and asked, “What am I doing?” I was still living the life of a full-time employee. I was managing my time by routines and habits, putting in some 7-9 hours most days, writing and editing, mentoring, as well as planning various activities. At my desk by 9 am, and apart from a break for lunch I might still be there by 6 pm or later. I reserved entertainment for the time after dinner, when I would usually read for 2-3 hours. Even worse: unlike when I was employed full-time, this was for seven days a week. What was I up to?
I had made one major change about three years ago. In the afternoon, I would step away from my desk, make myself a brewed coffee, and settle down in a chair to listen to a CD. For nearly a year, I listened to all of Bach’s organ music, each of the 13 CDs played several times. Then I moved over to the Beethoven String Quartets: I must have heard each of the sixteen, twenty times at least, even more for the last four. Now I have been caught up with Shostakovich for a few months, a couple of late String Quartets and a Piano Quintet. The music is demanding, yet I seldom slip away from careful listening. So, yes, there are times when I do stop working.
Listening to CDs coincided with my plan to write a blog each week. Every so often I would find myself thinking about various topics, and would light on an idea that I might want to use. It wasn’t deliberate, it just happened. Now I am a little more indolent. My planned day is semi-structured, though I’ve stuck with breakfast followed by emails at the beginning of the day, and reading in the evenings. The stranglehold of the Protestant work ethic is slowly loosening.
At the same time, I have made a discovery. The way I used to work was that I would think, spend time to sketch out some ideas, and then set to typing up a note or observation. Once that initial draft was done, the remaining work was editing, which I did with reasonable enthusiasm. Now I follow a different path. I will have some ideas, and start on a topic, a future blog. Then, away from the desk, no longer focussing on work, my mind wanders. Almost unprompted, ideas pop up. Many relate to one or two of the blogs I’ve been writing; others might be on a different task. Instead of having a clear approach for the next article or blog, it is a more organic process, the topic emerging rather than being set out in a planned, rigorous and well-structured outline.
I had noticed this process a few years earlier when I attempted to write detective novels. I hadn’t proved as adept at thinking through a complex plot as I’d anticipated. As a result, I would start a story without knowing how it would end (other than an epilogue dealing with the lives of the key characters, but not the murder mystery itself). Then, over time, the plot would emerge, elaborate and complicate itself, sometimes leading me to events and places quite different from the ones I imagined the story would embrace. As Pooh would say, I no longer underestimated the value of doing nothing, and I also accepted, there was no need to hurry; I would get there, although, it turns out, not with novels. I have been disappointed to have discovered that I don’t have the right kind of mind for a novelist, certainly not a good novelist. It requires a kind of focus I lack.
What I have discovered is the real value of indolence. As I am getting older, I know part of this is realising insights, wisdom, good ideas and further thoughts don’t come because I want them. They appear when my mind is free, able to wander down new paths and around familiar ones, seeing connections and possibilities, rethinking and reimagining – exactly because that is not what I am trying to do! By being indolent, by doing nothing in particular, it is as if I have given my brain a free pass: you can think what you like, go wherever you want, and see what emerges. What a discovery: this is what I had been teaching students in innovation classes!
I can guess what you might be thinking: not only getting older, but lazier, too. So, let me tell you about Mark O’Connell, and a day in his life just before his 40th birthday. Mark is an Irish author, based in Dublin. In addition to novels, he writes on literature, and his columns appear in such prestigious places as The New Yorker, The Guardian, The Observer, and the New York Review of Books (and others from time to time!). A prolific, busy man, close to 40 years old, he was confronting the realisation he was entering middle age, with the older of his two sons now a six year old and about to start school. He had begun to think about his own childhood, seeing it like a “lost civilisation”. [iv] Walking alone in a forest in Devon, he found himself at a turning point:
“I came to a clearing in a forest by a riverbank in Dartmoor national park, far enough from any trail that it seemed unlikely I would encounter anyone while I was there. I gathered some loose branches and stones and arranged them in a circle of about 10 metres in diameter, and then I walked into the circle and did not leave it until the same time the following day. The short version of this story is that nothing happened in that time: that I did nothing and witnessed nothing, experienced only the passage of the hours and minutes, and the languid dynamics of my own boredom. The long version isn’t exactly The Iliad, either, but in that version something could be said to have happened. Because by the time I walked out of that circle the following afternoon, I’d had an entirely unexpected and intensely cathartic encounter with the passage of time.” [v]
What did Mark experience? His article is compelling, and I hope you read it. What I will tell you is that he didn’t spend time thinking about being 40 years old, and how his life might unfold in the future. He did think about his childhood, and he thought about his six-year old. And he thought “with a pang of how I was always hurrying him – to get dressed, to get out the door for school, to finish his dinner, to get ready for bed – and of how heedlessly I was inflicting upon him my own anxious awareness of time as an oppressive force. How before he knew where he was, [his] son’s early years would have receded into the past, and he too would be out of the secret level of childhood and into the laterally scrolling world of adulthood.”
Above all, he found himself able to restore an environment of connectedness, to his own past, to the physical and natural world around him as he sat alone, without his mobile telephone, without any task he had to accomplish. If his article resonated with me, and, as I hope you will find, with you too, it is because he experienced a freedom that is hard to grasp. [vi] Clock time and calendar time are deep in our consciousness, as is the list of things we need to do, do now, do tomorrow. That awareness is like a prison, constraining us, denying us the opportunity to be free, to be engaged in the moment. As Mark wrote “The point of being here is to be here.”
We can’t all escape to the Devon woods by ourselves (Mark’s wife was wonderfully supportive, I thought). However, there are other ways we can step out of time, and out of the demands of the world around us. As I mentioned earlier, I escape through reading or music. Mark O’Connell found himself intimately connected with the physical environment around him; I can find myself involved in a fantasy world or a murder mystery, or drawn into music that absorbs me without asking for any explanation or reason. Indolence isn’t sinful, it is the only way I know to be truly free, to think, and to savour all the things we miss in busy living.
[i] All these quotes can be found in Winnie-the-Pooh, by A A Milne, Methuen. I have the 1926 E H Shepard version.
[ii] From Kenneth Grahame, The Wind in the Willows, Methuen, 1931, Chapter 1
[iii] The beginning lines of Alice in Wonderland, Lewis Carroll, Macmillan, 1865 (and republished ever since!)
[iv] What follows comes from Mark O’Connell, Splendid Isolation, The Long Read, The Guardian, 24 January 2020
[v] Some see boredom this way: https://aeon.co/ideas/boredom-is-but-a-window-to-a-sunny-day-beyond-the-gloom
[vi] Hot topic right now: https://aeon.co/essays/why-we-need-an-absence-of-noise-to-hear-anything-important?
