How to be idle

How To Be Idle

Tom Hodgkinson

We buy alarm clocks voluntarily.

For all modern society’s promises of leisure, liberty and doing what you want, most of us are still slaves to a schedule we did not choose.

Andrew Townsend, argued that to use mere force of law to impress the new work ethic on the workers ‘gives too much trouble, requires too much violence and makes too much noise’. Better and easier, he maintained, to keep them hungry. ‘Hunger, on the contrary, is not only a pressure which is peaceful, silent and incessant, but as it is the most natural motive for work and industry, it also provokes the most peaceful efforts.’

Institutions fear idle populations because an Idler is a thinker and thinkers are not a welcome addition to most social situations.

‘Convalescing’ is a word one doesn't hear much these days. It’s as if we have banished the notion that time is a healer, and replaced it with a battery of procedures and products designed to skip convalescence altogether.

In Paradise, we sleep all day.

The pedestrian is the highest and most mighty of beings; he walks for pleasure, he observes but does not interfere, he is not in a hurry, he is happy in the company of his own mind, he wanders detached, wise and merry, godlike. He is free. 

those who should be feeding the poor actually feed off the poor. 

I believe… that the distortion of the home into an apartment without a log fire began the destruction of the art of conversation

One of the reasons why so few people are to be found who seem sensible and pleasant in conversation is that almost everybody is thinking about what he wants to say himself rather than about answering clearly what is being said to him. The more clever and polite think it enough simply to put on an attentive expression, while all the time you can see in their eyes and train of thought that they are far removed from what you are saying and anxious to get back to what they want to say. They ought, on the contrary, to reflect that such keenness to please oneself is a bad way of pleasing or persuading others, and that to listen well and answer the point is one of the most perfect qualities one can have in conversation.

I remember being at school and being able to spend 20 minutes straight just staring out of the window. This is meditation, although my teachers called it daydreaming. Windows are free, and they are everywhere. They are on trains, on the top deck of buses, and most houses have loads of them. Read a poem, find a chair and sit by the window. That’s all that’s required.

It was about lunchtime. Suddenly Gavin sat on a rock and said, Tm just going to meditate for a bit.’ He then sat in silence for ten minutes. He had caught the moment; he didn't need a structure or a teacher in order to find moments of pure tranquility.

His only frustration was that when you are asleep, you are not conscious of its pleasures.

Love, too, is a kind of dream, a fanciful imagining of a future state of perfection. When we are in love, we project on to the love object our hopes for a dream life. We believe that the other will help us to create the dream.

A lucid dream, writes Paul Martin in Counting Sheep, ‘is a special sort of dream in which the dreamer is fully aware at the time that he or she is dreaming… they are more vivid and more memorable than ordinary dreams… lucid dreams are more like acting out fantasies and desires’.