LOUNGING ABOUT

It’s important to be lazy ! To make room in one’s life for periods of laziness .. not weeks or months (necessarily) but at the very least happy little blobs of time that are sufficient to allow one to be thoroughly ‘idle’. The Western world is obsessed with endless toil, Henry Ford’s “going and doing”, and (it strikes me) that working virtually all the time impoverishes people’s lives and leaves them with little opportunity to do anything other than feel exhausted. In their own defence people claim that they are FORCED to work in order to alleviate what is their ‘essential financial poverty’ but my response to that claim has always been that one should simply change one’s life style and better fit the form of one’s living to the available funds necessary for its sustenance. As my mother used to endlessly drone; “cut your coat according to your cloth”. Said another way, I say it’s fine to dream about owning a rolex watch, simply continue to dream about it rather than work three jobs in order to pay for it ! AND, it’s fine to ‘dream’ about the novel one is writing, because that is where novels come from – dreams. I am ‘working on my novel’ could possibly be the most wonderful excuse for inactivity that I have heard, but that is what I am doing. Lounging about, and without too much stressful effort, trying to decide whether the ‘female lead’ should offer the main protagonist a joint (or not) and what the ‘implications’ for the plot may (or may not) be. It’s a pleasant enough way in which to spend a day – staring into the limpid water of a swimming pool and hardly bothering to move except for a few thoughts splashing about in the head. It’s restorative, laziness – invigorating. Tomorrow I might well have sufficient energy to climb a Mount Everest, or to plough the back forty, or even (heaven forbid) to keep writing (lol) but today is for being ‘thoroughly idle’ and it has the ambient temperature appropriate to doing sweet F.A. – it’s hot and sticky like Florida. I might ‘fall’ into the pool BUT that would take too much effort, so instead (sworn as I am to being ‘idle’) I shall sit here in the air conditioning and re-read some of The Dialogues of Plato’. Was ever Socrates a hero ? Bless him, we need more of his kind. Sad that they condemned the ‘original thinker’ to death in Ancient Athens for merely asking apposite and pertinent questions of the citizenry in order to establish what they really thought. This apparently enraged the people thus questioned because it exposed them to the fallacious core of their own reasoning and made them run the danger of having to laugh at themselves! Two thousand odd years later could we ever do with a Socrates in the contemporary world! The place is nuts along with most of the people in it. BUT, why worry ? I leave it to Socrates to show the essentially absurd premise of THAT
question! 🙂