In praise of idleness
by Stephanie Piper
Idleness gets a bad rap.
Action rules, even if it's only the mindless clicking of a video game or the television remote control. Despite its general rejection of Puritan ideals, the modern world still views inactivity as a threat. Staring into space is for losers. Staring at Brady Bunch reruns or Tomb Raider has some redeeming cultural value.
My own appreciation of idleness has been a long time coming. I spent my formative years in a convent school where wasting time was a crime comparable to grand larceny. A free 10 minutes was a heaven-sent opportunity to straighten a desk drawer, sew on a button, or memorize another stanza of "Tintern Abbey." We all knew who ruled the workshop of idle hands.
At home, it was the same drill. "I have nothing to do" was a dangerous sentence to utter in our house. There were leaves to rake, rooms to clean, small brothers to supervise. The goal was full employment, and it was always met.
As a mother of three young children, I had no idle moments. Ever. When they slept, I folded laundry or collapsed onto the nearest bed. In the rare intervals when they played quietly, I made macaroni and cheese. Reflection was not part of the job description.
I craved idleness. I wanted to park on a bench under the trees and consider light and shadow. I longed to sit in the reading room of the New York Public Library and stare at nothing. I wanted to ride a bus to the end of the line and turn around and ride it back again, oblivious to the stops and the scenery and my fellow passengers. I wanted this so much that there were days when I paid a teenage babysitter $5 I could ill afford to indulge my craving. I would return refreshed, but guilty.
I knew that doing absolutely nothing was absolutely necessary to my sanity, and I had a vague notion that the frail shoots of creativity flourished in that idle space. I just couldn't explain why I wasn't using my free time to shop for shoes at Bloomingdale's.
Then I spent a month at a writer's retreat, and learned a valuable lesson. Surrounded by high-powered creative types, I sat each day before a blank computer screen and felt like an impostor. They all seemed to toil non-stop, pausing only for dinner in the communal dining room where they chatted about six-figure advances from their publishers.
One afternoon, walking miserably in the woods, I came upon a Pulitzer-Prize-winning poet who was also in residence. He was carrying a fishing rod and a tackle box, and whistling. We talked for a few minutes. "It's great here," he said. "Haven't done a lick of work in a week."
He had spent his days drifting across the lake in a borrowed canoe, lowering a line when he felt like it, more often gazing at the sky. The poems would come later.
That little scrap of vindication comforts me still. I haven't won any Pulitzers, but I have made peace with periodic idleness. Sometimes, there is no substitute for nothing.
May 23, 2002 * Vol. 12, No. 21
© 2002 Metro Pulse
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