doing nothing

In a quaint Scottish town, inside an exquisite church whose ceiling appeared as high as heaven, an organist was practising. Music filled every stone cranny and human pore. This was years ago – I was on a whisky tour and possibly in an altered state of consciousness – and I’m telling you this only to laboriously make a point.

I enjoy visiting churches.

I also like Montmartre, roaming some random bookshop Maya Angelou may have wandered into, strolling through a Phuket market, and examining the Science Museum in London’s South Kensington. But in truth, one of my ideal holidays is something far removed from such touristy hard work.

It involves doing nothing.

For six days in Melbourne last month at my daughter’s house, I achieved nothing worth a Facebook photo or an Instagram post. I stared at clouds that I imagined as warships, pottered, was hypnotised by winter rain streaking down glass and held my granddaughter’s hand as one might a lifeline. You should try it. The Netherlands, this creative land of Rembrandt and Johan Cruyff, has even turned this do-nothingness into an art form with a name. Niksen.

My friend’s sister – some mix of meticulous and mad – makes Excel sheets for her holidays. I didn’t know there were such people or that there were so many of them. Everything is listed: places to go, when, how, and for how long. A month’s adventure across towns set down as grimly as a grocery list.

My packing for this trip involved no information on cafes retrieved from Instagram, no walking recommendations offered on TikTok and, most tellingly, no work laptop. My office would manage; I’d thrive. These temporary divorces are renewing in an era where we have blurred boundaries. We need to give ourselves permission to say we are uncontactable.

I live, like you, a purposeful life, joyous in so many parts but also relentless, where we’re always chasing some vague, better version of ourselves, our brains overheating like engines on a ship, driven by some guilt-inducing line in a third-rate self-help book about making every minute count. No, some minutes are best spent just sitting with a dog, a gentle hand on its body, and feeling its ribcage lurch as it dreams.

I relish my life, the research that writing demands, the curiosity that infects it and the ideas I collide with, but sometimes, there’s a value in being superbly unproductive. No plan, no goal, no destination, no guilt. And so, on a couch in Melbourne, I felt like a fast train that had paused at night at a dimly lit station for a refuelling. Those old steam engines puffed gently when stationary, I just sighed.

In effect, I became the very thing that terrifies parents: A loafer, shirker, slacker. How utterly wonderful. We’re normally tightly tied to the structured life and captives to our clock. It ticks, we tock. But now, for this sliver of time, I’d turned it all inside out. My phone often lay upstairs and I did not exercise a lick. My six-pack would have to be delayed.

What is doing nothing for me? Contemplating, drifting, meditating, daydreaming, emptying the mind, surrendering to days with no real purpose? Perhaps a little of everything. My workaholic friend S, who hates being rushed on holidays, watches ants work and discovers worlds in blades of grass. He makes his world smaller and quieter and lets the multitude of voices in his head subside. Like him, I wasn’t working my brain furiously, not shining it like a torch on a single idea.

Go somewhere, a bucket-list bragging world urgently tells us. See something. It’s a worthy message, but occasionally, it’s permissible to go deaf. For six days, I joyously accomplished nothing and yet received a great gift: proximity to family.

I stood in a field as morning crept upon us, my feet wet and icy, my daughter next to me, her hair as beautifully tinged with grey as the wide sky. I listened to my nine-year-old granddaughter speak so naturally about her friend who identifies as “they/them”, and it reminded me that bigotry is only a grown-up disease that we teach to the young. I discussed politics and cricket with my son-in-law, and decided sweet chilli and sour cream are the only chips worth eating. Artificial intelligence cannot create this life for me.

I met a musician on a walk, and we talked cellos and guitar collections. I read a few pages of a new Martin Luther King Jr biography, saw a mediocre film in an empty hall and slipped into daydreaming. Once this was a childhood staple, now in a world of technological toys, it’s a sinking habit. We’re all handcuffed to our phones, refusing to look up and out and let our imagination unspool like a fisherman casting a line on a quiet river.

Perhaps if we did, we’d become Walter Mitty, the fascinating character sketched by James Thurber in a short story in The New Yorker in 1939. Mitty is a mild fellow, out shopping with his wife, when one moment he dreams he is a daredevil pilot and the next an expert surgeon. He gets wondrously lost within his private worlds, and it leads to a telling conversation with his wife.

“I was thinking,” said Walter Mitty. “Does it ever occur to you that I am sometimes thinking?” She looked at him. “I’m going to take your temperature when I get you home,” she said.

ST ILLUSTRATION: MIEL

The idle mind can be a devilishly creative workshop, and daydreaming sparks invention and stirs ideas. As the Turkish writer Orhan Pamuk once wrote: “We may not understand where they come from or what, if anything, our daydreams may signify, but when we sit down to write it is our daydreams that breathe life into us, as wind from an unknown place stirs an aeolian harp. One might even say that we surrender to this mysterious wind like a captain who has no idea where he’s bound.”

I was simply bound for calm. Our modern lives are filled with urgency, our days challenged by Russian invasions, calls to upskill and enlarged prostates, till we feel stress claw at our insides. And so this holiday was a step away from that, a taking of a journey more inward than out, a temporary preference for stillness over the hectic, a gathering of myself for a return to productiveness.

I returned with no cultural trinket, no Australian sports scarf and no Akubra hat, and yet I had luggage. I brought back an overweight body, happiness on whatever index you can measure it and an envelope full of pink hearts with messages in a childish hand. One said: “Please Don’t Go”. I also carried the understanding that just to be able to do nothing makes me entitled. On an exceedingly unfair planet, my laziness was an act of privilege. 

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