Do Nothing to Change Your Life. Stephen Cottrell
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or at least a reminder that the world isn’t as important as it likes to make out. One of my children is now a teenager. He sees life differently. Each day I marvel at his fantastic capacity to lie in bed. I moan about him – that is expected of parents – but really I am jealous. I observe the daring scope of his sloth with secret envy.
More worrying, I keep meeting other parents of teenage children who berate this astonishing capacity in their own offspring and say, rather priggishly, that they couldn’t lie in like that even if they wanted to. But I could. For sure, the opportunities are severely limited – but left to my own devices, and without the clamours of work or having to attend to children, I’m sure I could still do it. I could lie in till lunchtime.
Now, I know that with age come changing patterns and requirements for sleep. Many older people really can’t sleep in even if they want to. But I am not thinking about this: not a physical condition that would prevent me, but some inner imperative driving me to conclude that it is wrong.
And yet, only yesterday morning, an opportunity for blissful nothingness emerged. I’m writing this at the end of the Christmas holidays and the children have not gone back to school yet. They had got themselves up and were watching television. My teenage son was still in bed (of course). And I lay in. I half slept and half woke and enjoyed for several hours that dreamy, in-betweeny state of living that hovers between consciousness and sleep. At about nine I got up, leaving my wife in bed, and made us both some tea. I took it back to bed and let it go cold. I dozed off for another half an hour. I slept a bit more, and I got up at about eleven. It was one of the best mornings I’ve had for ages. I don’t want to do it every morning. But I do want to do it again, and in a little while I’ll tell you why.
Now I could tell you the reason I lay in was that I have been so busy lately and working so hard that I had really earned it. But that’s not quite true. I have been busy and I have been working hard, but I’ve also had most of last week off. In fact, it took me the best part of a week to de-tox myself from the busyness of life so that I had half a chance of arriving at a place of restful idleness at all. So I don’t want to pretend that rest and play are only allowed as reward for effort. They are good in themselves. They lead us to places of self-discovery and renewed creativity.
We must confront the preening self-righteousness of those who claim they’ve lost the ability, because they either feel ashamed of admitting this secret pleasure or, worse, have genuinely arrived at the conclusion that lying in bed is somehow morally repugnant: an affront to the all-conquering work ethic of Western society which says we must be busy, busy, busy all the time. Shame, I can understand: none of us can avoid contamination from the frenzied roller coaster of the ‘24/7 work-all-the-hours-God-sends-you’ culture we are part of. Even as I wrote the words ‘got up at about eleven’ I felt a twinge of guilt. Should I change that to ten? Is it a crime against the culture of busyness to admit such sloth? But that is what is being implied. Shame, guilt, busyness have won the day. You are only able to function on one setting: full-on busyness. Either that, or death. Is this why so many men expire as soon as they retire? They have never learnt to do nothing.
And so I look forward to the opportunities to lie in when they come along. I embrace them, wallow in them, push the guilt aside and luxuriate in the heavy moments of idleness. And I also start looking for other opportunities to stop and let the world pass me by. My teachers were right: I am a dreamer. It’s just that the dreamer has been kept awake too long. The sleep deprivation of modern life has suffocated creativity.
When I was younger I can remember not just lying in bed, but lying on the sofa listening to music for hours on end; I can remember going for walks for no apparent reason and with no fixed destination in mind; just walking and thinking and idling away the hours. I can remember, as quite a small boy, lying beneath a huge chestnut tree and staring up into its branches, wondering at its nascent fruitfulness, and resting not just under its presence but somehow within it. All this is part of the person I am, but, for the present, it is chiefly lost to me. I am much too busy, and I have allowed busyness to invade my life so much that it gets harder and harder to be in touch with that other part of me which thrives on the creativity of indolent wastefulness.
But, when I do get back in touch, wonderful things happen. Not only do I become more myself – and that is joy enough – but from myself there comes fruitfulness.
And now I really must get up. Otherwise it will be as bad as yesterday and I’ll still be in bed in the middle of the morning. I’m sure there are some important things I need to be getting on with. But let me just tell you about what happened in Dublin airport last year. It will explain a little more about the joyful art of doing nothing and where it can lead you.
I was speaking at a conference. I flew out from Heathrow and had a lovely couple of days with a wonderful group of clergy from the dioceses of Dublin and Glendalough. My return flight was due to leave at half past three. Or so I thought. I needed to check in at least an hour beforehand and as it turned out they got me to the airport at shortly after two.
However, when I looked at my ticket I discovered that my flight was not actually leaving until half past seven. Somehow I had misread or misremembered the time. I was too embarrassed to say this to my guests, so I bade them farewell and set about trying to get on an earlier flight. There was one available, but it involved paying a hefty surcharge. I could neither afford nor justify this expense so, instead, I settled down to a five-hour sojourn in Dublin airport. It is not a very big place, and after about an hour I had toured the shops, perused the newspaper and drunk a coffee. Still over four hours to go.
There was a restless impatience within me. I was cross with myself for not getting the time right. I was cross with the situation: so much time being wasted. The minutes ticked by with an aching slowness. The hours before me were an unwanted eternity. But then, imperceptibly, a calm came over me. The next four hours did not have to be a problem. They did not have to be a waste. Rather, they could be a gift. And as this thought settled in my mind I found I was able to just sit down and be still, and find contentment without having to be busy. I could relax and just be.
The busyness of the airport terminal carried on buzzing and humming around me. But now I was somehow in the crowd without being swallowed up by it.
I bought another coffee. I strolled around a bit more, but this time I was happy just to stroll and think and not worry about the time and what I was or wasn’t going to do with it. After a couple of hours I got myself something to eat. And then I had a beer. And sitting in the bar I found my thoughts returning to some half-formed ideas for a poem that I had started musing on many years before. I got out my notebook (which I always carry with me – usually for worthy work reasons) and began to play with some ideas.
Slowly, a poem was born. Not a particularly good poem. Not a poem that I want to reproduce here. Not a poem that matters in itself. Neither does it matter that it was a poem at all. It could just as easily have been a picture, or even a doodle, or I could have got out my knitting. Or it could have been a snooze or a daydream. Or it might have been that in those moments of relaxed dreaming I would have remembered that I was a person who wrote poems/liked gardening/stripped down motorcycles or pressed wild flowers . . . delete as applicable, or add your own day-dreams.
What matters is what happened. Something was awoken within me while I was ostensibly doing nothing. I thought my flight was that evening, but actually the enforced delay took me on a much more exhilarating journey. Rooted to the spot I was able to travel back into myself: back into a part of me that had lain dormant for many years; crowded out with all the activity of work and busyness. For in the past I used to write a lot of poems. Just as many of us used to jog or crochet or swim or grow azaleas. And, although it is true that writing poetry (like many things) requires in equal parts discipline as well as desire, if there is no desire then no amount of discipline will ever get the poem written. Paradoxically, sitting in the airport lounge, I discovered that the discipline that was needed was the discipline of – well, here is the problem: what shall we call it? I want to use the word idleness, because that’s what it feels like, but is even the use of that word allowing the culture that so abhors the vacuum of nothingness to set the agenda? When I speak about what happens when