Doing nothing

For a number of reasons I rarely tend towards the autobiographical here. I'm not really sure why. Looking back to the earliest posts here, I didn't have any qualms about it then. But then, I was much more convinced of my own capacity to be interesting in those days.

Of late, this blog has been more about things than me, at least I've tried to make that the case. Writing about oneself seems to me to be a fairly spectacular act of egotism at best, monstrously gauche at worst. It occurs to me, however, that this is somewhat self-defeating since, at a stage of my life when I'm struggling to write about anything at all, this is one of the few things I am qualified to write about.

I am now, at least, relatively confident that the world doesn't need me adding my opinions to the torrent that we are subjected to anytime we're unwise enough to stray too close to the internet. So I suppose it makes sense that I step back a bit, look inward a bit, and reflect. Become less broadcast. 

Ah, a middle aged man is taking stock. That's novel (in fact that's far too many novels, all written by middle aged men, but a post about my theory that many books are intrinsically the same book will have to wait for another time). Yes, well, I have rarely claimed originality throughout my writing life, no point starting now.

To this end, I'm going to write a short post about the ten minutes of my morning where I did nothing. And how it will almost certainly wind up being the highlight of my day.

I had a sit down.

Oh, you need more? This isn't enough for you? Okay, I shall expand.

I had a nice sit down.

No? Okay. I had a nice sit down on the sofa in my conservatory, and watched various birds flutter and squabble over the feeders; House Sparrows, a Blackbird, some Starlings, a couple of Goldfinches and a single, skulking Dunnock, to be precise. It is noteworthy because, for ten blissful minutes, I did nothing. Nada. Fuck all. Sweet Fanny Adams. You get the gist.

This is not something that happens terribly often. And was certainly not about to happen again on this day, where I was pulling a straight through in work, being a chef down. With a business to run and three kids, time to do nothing is perforce somewhat limited.

Even when I do have free time, there are things to do. Enough housework to salve the conscience been done? Laundry getting out if control? Been for a run yet? Been to the gym yet? Even my walks to work and back are freighted with the knowledge that I could be getting that passive aggressive green owl Duo off my back for a day. Yes, you little sod, there is time for a French lesson.

And don't get me started on my lapsed writer's guilt.

Doing nothing every once in a while is, I would argue, essential to one's well being. The mind rests and drifts, when I stand up again, the day has swum into focus. But even this makes it sound like a task to be accomplished. The sort of thing that awful people on awful podcasts about being a success schedule into their day after yoga and just before their juice cleanse.

Hey, maybe I could monetise this then? Buy a shedload of sofas and tell a bunch of high-performance types to have a nice sit down at 250 quid a pop. There might be something in this.

But I don't mean it in some dull self-improvement sense, I regard it more as maintenance. A little bit of nothing helps the whole lot of everything tick over. And I was right. The rest of the day was a whole lot of everything. But that bit of nothing made dealing with it so much easier.