“Happy Idling:” The Essential Nothing

This month the deadlines are stacked up like flapjacks, but I do not want to work. All I want is to go outside and soak up as much of the light and color the short days will allow.

For once, October wasn’t a diva and saved some glory for November. Usually, we only have the subtle pink and burgundy oak leaves left by now. But this year, the sassafras leaves are still waving, the ginkgo is more green than gold, and sunset-colored maples are competing with the Christmas lights that have already gone up. Autumn is taking its time in spite of the calendar, and I just want to be in the middle of it while it’s happening.

Meanwhile, that little pile of to-dos I thought I had under control is cascading into chaos, threatening to take me with it. I’m using my tools—I’ve got the whole mess micro-mapped, broken into baby steps. I thought I’d be less daunted if I broke it down. I thought I’d just soar through, but I’m moving at more of a meander.

The potency of liminal time

Lucky for me, I have Brenda Ueland backing me up. In her slim, hope-packed manifesto, If You Want To Write: A Book about Art, Independence and Spirit, first published in 1938, she proposes that the “idea that we must always be energetic and active is all wrong.” Instead, she promises, “the imagination needs moodling,—long, inefficient, happy idling, dawdling and puttering.”

I love this. In this light, afternoons spent pondering, strolls outside spent gathering petals, rocks, leaves—all have value. It isn’t laziness or just avoiding the inevitable to stay in bed for a few extra minutes some mornings. Maybe those quiet, just-waking moments, when pieces of dream and thought drift down together in new interlocking orders, are as important as the work I’ll get around to after. In that liminal time, crucial creative energy accumulates, banks up, gathering in potency so it can fuel the creative work of another time.

I know this from dabbling in other disciplines—recovery days are as important as running days. If I want to run next week, or when I’m 75, I have to give myself days in between to stretch and rest, refuel and heal. The garden teaches this too. You can’t plant tomatoes in the same patch every year—the soil needs fallow time so it can be replenished.

For the sake of today and tomorrow

I try to hold this all-too-appealing permission slip in balance with other advice that I know to be true, including the undeniable prescription that, to be a good writer, you need to write everyday. Still, Brenda Ueland makes good sense when she says that “what we write today slipped into our souls some other day when we were alone and doing nothing.” What she calls a “span of idling yesterday,” therefore, is essential. Racing from one task to the next so that we can get it all done doesn’t lead to the best work, she argues, because “good ideas come slowly” as a result of “clear, tranquil and unstimulated” time—and the more slowly they come, she says, the better they’ll be.

Still, deadlines loom, and I can’t pretend otherwise without disappointing myself and others. So today, I do a task and cross it off the list. Then before the sun goes down, I give in to “unstimulated” time. For the sake of the novel I hope to start next year, I get myself under the ginkgo branches to check on the progression of green to gold.

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Noelle Beverly writes poetry and prose, promotes local writers in the surrounding community, and is a member of the BACCA Literary group. Photos by the author.