In Praise of Idleness

Lately, I’ve been reading The Essays of E.B. White, a collection by the author of the famed children’s stories Stuart Little and Charlotte’s Web. Somewhere I picked up that he was among the best-ever essayists, and since that’s kinda what I do here, I thought to myself, “maybe I can learn something?”

Early in the book, White includes a dispatch from January of 1958 — which must have been unimaginably frigid cold, given where he lived on the coast of Maine’s Blue Hill Bay. The opening paragraph caught me right from the get-go, and I was entranced:

Margaret Mitchell once made a remark I have treasured. Someone asked her what she was “doing,” and she replied, “Doing? It’s a full-time job to be the author of Gone With the Wind.” I remember this cheerful statement this morning as I lay in bed, before daylight, marshaling in my head the problems and projects and arrangements of the day and wondering when I would again get the chance to “do” something — like sit at a typewriter. I felt a kinship with Miss Mitchell and comforted myself with the pleasing thought that just to live in New England in winter is a full-time job; you don’t have to “do” anything. The idle pursuit of making a living is pushed to one side, where it belongs, in favor of living itself, a task of such immediacy, variety, beauty, and excitement that one is powerless to resist its wild embrace.

I’ve bolded the last sentence because… well, don’t you just love this? This idea of pushing “the pursuit of making a living” to the side, placing it in a box where it belongs, so we can give ourselves over to the real task of our lives — one of “such immediacy, variety, beauty, and excitement that one is powerless to resist its wild embrace”?

Now, I mean no offense to anyone who has found their purpose in their job. I know plenty of people who have, and I’m happy for them. (Sometimes I wish I could be like them!)

But while I’ve always worked — since I was sixteen years old, when I got my first job bagging groceries at Winn-Dixie — I’m not sure I’ve ever quite identified with work in the way I expected to when I was younger, and first started exploring careers I might go into.

That can make a person feel out of step, especially in the era we’re living in, which hasn’t changed much since the philosopher Bertrand Russell wrote this essay back in the early 1930s:

Like most of my generation, I was brought up on the saying “Satan finds some mischief still for idle hands to do.” Being a highly virtuous child, I believed all that I was told and acquired a conscience which has kept me working hard down to the present moment. But although my conscience has controlled my actions, my opinions have undergone a revolution. I think that there is far too much work done in the world, that immense harm is caused by the belief that work is virtuous, and that what needs to be preached in modern industrial countries is quite different from what always has been preached.

In fact, you could argue this attitude has probably only intensified, couldn’t you? It’s enough to make a person sigh, rest their chin in their hands, and let out a long exhale, wondering how the world got itself in this place.

Truthfully, I do feel more at ease with this now that I’m in mid-fifties, versus twenty or thirty years ago. Back then, I’m sure I felt more of a sense of something being missing; there are so many paths you might take, how do you know which is the right one?

What if you miss your calling? (Is there even such a thing as “a calling”) Can you go back and start over? Would you even want to if you could? Or maybe… serendipity and happy accidents can work out just as well?

Okay, it’s late at night and I’m sure you’re as tired as I am so I’ll wrap things up right here — but I’d love to know what your experience has been.

As always, keep in touch and let me know how your running/life is going 😀

Your friend,

— Terrell