Bumbling

This weekend, I walked through the park for about an hour, bouncing from one flower to another, looking at trees, smelling grass. I was officially bumbling, a term I learned when I wrote this post about The Ideler. 

It's summer, a perfect time to slow down and savor.

A time to do a bit more bumbling.

A friend read my last post and told me about an article she read about a man who’s devoted his life to …idleness. His name is Tom Hodgkinson and he’s based, like so many good things, in the UK. His mission is to remind people of the forgotten simple pleasures of doing nothing.

To do that, he publishes books, a website and a magazine called The Idler. (All of this seems a tad ambitious for a man known as “The Idler” but I digress...)

Here are Tom Hodginson’s tips on how to be an idler:

Banish the guilt. We are all told that we should be terribly busy, so we can’t laze around without that nagging feeling that we need to be getting stuff done. I rejected my guilt upon learning that Europeans in the Middle Ages felt no shame for lolling about. Their favorite philosopher, Aristotle, had praised the contemplative life, and the monks spent a lot of time just praying and chanting. Guilt for doing nothing is artificially imposed on us by a Calvinistic and Puritanical culture that wants us to work hard. When you understand that it hasn’t always been this way, it becomes easier to shake it off.

Choose the right role models. Most of the great musicians and poets were idlers. So feed yourself a diet of John Lennon, Oscar Wilde, Walt Whitman, and the like. Carrying a slim volume of verse in your purse or pocket can be therapeutic―something from Keats, who wrote of “evenings steep’d in honied indolence,” or Wordsworth, of course. (What could be more idle than wandering lonely as a cloud?) It’s delightful to read a few lines while you’re on a bus or a train, then stare out the window and ponder their meaning.

Sketch a flower. If you are new to idling and feel compelled to be purposefully occupied, sketching a flower at the kitchen table can be an excellent way to bring some divine contemplation into your life. The act of drawing makes you observe the bloom in a way you never have before. All anxieties fly away as you lose yourself in close study. And at the end of it you have a pretty little sketch.

Go bumbling. Bumbling is a nice word that means “wandering around without purpose.” It was indulged in by the poets of 19th-century Paris. They called themselves flâneurs and were said to have taken tortoises around on leads, which gives you an idea of the tempo of their rambles. Children are good bumblers. Try making a deliberate effort to slow down your walking pace. You’ll find yourself coming alive, and you’ll enjoy simply soaking in the day.

Play the ukulele. The ukulele is the sound of not working. My wife hates it for that very reason: The twang of those strings means that I am not doing something useful around the house. I keep my ukulele in the kitchen and play it at odd moments, like while I’m waiting for the kettle to boil.

I am going work on my idleness and try some of these out. With the exception of the ukulele. I’m just not sure how well my husband would take it if I become and idler and started to play the ukulele. One step at a time.