Doing Nothing

Have you ever noticed those ads for insurance companies that offer you annuities for your old age?  They feature impossibly good-looking, sportily dressed men and women engaged in various leisure activities, such as fishing, playing tennis, and golfing.  I suppose that some retirees actually spend their time like that.  In fact a good friend of mine, an extremely distinguished judge (and as good-looking as the male models in the ads, if older), and his wife retired to a community known for its golf courses, and every day of the week, from Monday through Friday, they played golf.  This was their principal activity when they weren’t traveling.  I admired him greatly, but such a life in retirement would drive me mad.

I first met him and his wife on board a freighter sailing from Suva to Hong Kong, a two-week leg on what would be for them a two-month journey.  We were the only passengers.  One of the things he told me as we sailed northwest is that retirement is a career for which you have to plan and prepare.  I was only a year away from retirement and I took his advice seriously.  I began to research a book on a history of vacations, with the intention of continuing it after my retirement. For reasons that are still opaque, the project later turned to ashes in my mouth and I had to find other projects with which to occupy myself.  This I did.

But why did I feel a need to occupy myself with a serious project?  Why do I feel the same way today? Why can't I be content meeting friends for lunch, visiting art galleries and museums, spending an occasional afternoon at a film or play, reading books for more than twenty minutes at a time, and taking long, leisurely walks?  Why do I feel guilty when I have nothing to do – or, since there’s always something to do (right now my books and files are hollering at me, “put us in order!”) – why do I feel guilty when I’m doing nothing?  Why is the Protestant Ethic attacking me when I’m not even Protestant?

Doing nothing, after all, can be delicious.  Mark Twain wrote about the delights of ocean travel when “you have nothing to do but do nothing.”  Of course, when he wrote that line he was in the midst of a hideously strenuous year-long world lecture tour and besides he was suffering from boils.  Naturally, he welcomed the surcease from effort offered by his ocean journeys.  Still, I recall my own pleasure on freighter voyages, as I lounged on a chaise longue, an open book face down on my lap, and gazed at the immense sky, as the vessel gently rocked me to sleep.   Years ago, I recuperated from a major operation for several weeks on an Aegean island.  I walked along the coast, drank coffee in cafes, wandered into ancient churches, read the Greek edition of The Herald Tribune, sat on my room’s balcony with a scotch in my hand and looked out at the islands dotting the sea.  When I make up my mind to do nothing, I’m pretty good at it. 

But in both these examples, on the ocean voyages and on the Aegean island, I had an excuse to do nothing.  Now I must learn to do nothing without an excuse and without feeling guilty about it.    I suspect that I will need the rest of my life to learn.