The pleasure of leisure: Finding value in disengaging from our pursuits, every now and then

The years 2020 and 2021 have been witness to the slow-but-inevitable coming-apart of our lives due to the coronavirus pandemic. Amid moments of turmoil and pain, what made life bearable — and perhaps even worth it for many of us — were the pockets of leisure and loiter we carved out for ourselves.

Firstpost’s new series ‘Leisure & Loiter’ explores the value that these acts — and the many things that encompass them such as rest, love, pleasure, hobbies, travel, day-dreaming, food, conversation — add to our everyday existence.

In Part 1, Rohini Kejriwal makes a case for doing nothing, from time to time. Read more from this series here .

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“I’m fond of doing nothing,

so I do it all day long.

Wherever I do nothing,

I don’t ever do it wrong.

When I am doing nothing,

there is nothing that I do,

for if I started something,

it would mean that I was through.”

— Jack Prelutsky, ‘I’m Sitting Doing Nothing’

In a society where busyness is the norm and productivity is shoved down our psyche 24 x 7, it’s a pleasant surprise to make time to do nothing in particular.

Up until the 2020 global lockdown, a majority of us had forgotten what it felt like to not have anywhere to be, anything to do. If the last year taught us one thing, it was to not take anything for granted anymore. A year of lost opportunities, cancelled plans and more time than ever before at our disposal. Time melted away, like in Salvador Dalí’s The Persistence of Memory.

Homebound, many were forced to acquire new skills to survive: cooking, gardening, sourdough baking, the completion of long-pending personal projects, and life changes. The world also saw a rise in depression, anxiety, substance abuse and chronophobia — the fear of the passage of time, often felt by prisoners and terminally ill patients.

I write this essay to make the case that time is not the enemy.

2020 left me with bad knees, impostor syndrome and no steady income. But all those hours alone gave me time to read, doodle, and dream up new personal projects. Pandemic hobbies were taken up and abandoned: 1000-piece puzzles, cooking every dish in my mother’s recipe book, time-consuming sourdough experiments. It made me value time (and the lack of it) like never before and re-prioritise what really matters, forcing me to acknowledge my privilege for having free time at all.

The act of making time for leisure and loitering is almost an essential aspect of creative experiences, for me anyway. Usually, a question or idea appears, and instead of trying to find the answer immediately, I allow myself to bring in the element of play and follow wherever it leads me. This is why I always keep a notebook and pen on me, in case inspiration decides to come knocking by. I have actively learned to slow down my thoughts, to do things purely as a labour of love because they bring me joy, for no other ulterior motive. This has helped me focus less on doing, and more on being.

This is a time for unconditioning and unlearning patterns of thinking and doing. We underestimate the power of leisure and loiter, of what goes on subconsciously. This is an urge to take a step back from the cultural brainwashing and take a moment for yourself.

Alex Soojung-Kim Pang, in his popular book Rest: Why You Get More Done When You Work Less, writes:

“When we treat workaholics as heroes, we express a belief that labor rather than contemplation is the wellspring of great ideas and that the success of individuals and companies is a measure of their long hours.”

There is ample proof that the opposite is actually true; for example, the slow-but-steady shift to four-day work weeks in many parts of the world. We are worth more than our productivity.

Far too many writers, artists, and poets have vouched for the fact that creativity manifests when you become the vessel, the channel for ideas to pour out of you. But in a digital age when we’re always hyper-connected and over-inundated with content, it takes freeing up of the headspace for the “big magic”, as Elizabeth Gilbert calls it, to appear.

“The trick is to just follow your small moments of curiosity. It doesn’t take a massive effort. Just turn your head an inch. Pause for an instant. Respond to what has caught your attention. Look into it a bit. Is there something there for you?” asks Gilbert.

In a generation of over-thinkers, wouldn’t it be nice to be a non-thinker, to get some much-needed R&R for the mind? Intentionally doing nothing opens up the doors to possibilities, making way for a richer inner life and dormant ideas to find their way to the surface.

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Artwork © Divya/ @divcookie for Firstpost

The trick, I find, is to not try too hard at doing nothing. When Robert Frost wrote his famous ‘Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening’, he was essentially loitering in the New England landscape and arrived at the poem. Similarly, the beloved poet Mary Oliver dedicated her entire life to paying attention to the in-between moments. In her poem ‘The Summer Day’, Mary aptly writes:

“I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down

into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,

how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,

which is what I have been doing all day.”

Embrace idleness. Let go of the notion, the guilt and the perception of laziness that stems from not accounting for every second of your waking life. By all means have a routine, structure your day into slots and things-to-do, be productive and get work done. But stop trying to fight time.

In a world filled with to-do lists and deadlines, it can be difficult finding time to just do nothing. But I like writer Catherine Andrews’ approach. Andrews, who runs a fantastic newsletter The Sunday Soother, recommends a re-branding of lists, such as the “to create” list, the “to trust myself with” list, the “did it” list and/or the “to value” list. Certainly worth exploring, at the very least.

Most importantly, allow yourself to be bored. Find moments of inspiration in the dull, mundane moments. Go for a walk without a destination in mind. There is an abundance of literature on the virtues of idle walking and the benefits of boredom. In our age of hyperproductivity, Rebecca Solnit’s words in Field Notes to Getting Lost make sense of the human proclivity for loitering:

“Thinking is generally thought of as doing nothing in a production-oriented culture, and doing nothing is hard to do. It’s best done by disguising it as doing something, and the something closest to doing nothing is walking. It strikes a delicate balance between working and idling, being and doing.”

What we tend to forget is that there is value in disengaging from creative pursuits every now and then. Nobody seems to make time for doing nothing anymore.

If we are constantly filling our days with things to do, instead of small nothings like daydreaming or looking out the window, we are stifling the very source of our creativity and imagination. One of my favorite personal projects that came from a place of boredom is a series of Cloud Doodles, where I doodle the creatures and scenes in the sky I’m imagining on photographs of clouds.

Another example is of artist David Hockney, who was stuck in his Normandy home when the pandemic hit. Instead of feeling bored with the same views or feeling the pandemic rut that most of us felt, he turned that time into one of the most productive periods of his life. Treating the lockdown as a residency of sorts, Hockney decided to devote time to really look for beauty in his surroundings, leading to a whole new exhibition David Hockney: My Normandy.

Like Hockney, the pandemic led me to draw more than I ever have. This time alone also taught me to embrace the idea of creating something just because I feel like it. The arrival of an idea is ample reason for bringing it to life, no matter what the end result turns out to be. Not everything we make or write has to be a masterpiece or a magnum opus. We do not need to subscribe to ideals and standards set by the Internet or the elitist art world. We need to accept that creative blocks and impostor syndrome may come and go. If that happens, disengage, try something different, feel bored, and return to your creativity with a fresh perspective and renewed energy.

We need to embark on a path of what I like to call gentlification — the slow, intentional process of becoming gentler towards oneself. The next time you feel the do-something itch, ask yourself what WH Davies did in his poem ‘Leisure’:

What is this life if, full of care, we have no time to stand and stare?

Rohini Kejriwal is a writer, poet and a curator based out of Bengaluru. She runs The Alipore Post, a curated newsletter and journal that highlights contemporary art, poetry, photography, music and all things creative.