Idling

When you visit our coast spot you will notice a variety of reading material exploring the notion of ‘Idling’. Whether that be books and mags about design, landscape, art, or the art of living. One of my fave books and mags is ‘The Idler’. One of the things I like about them is that embracing idling is so counter cultural, subversive even.

I grew up in a family of Presbyterians, I like to think of this as Neo Calvinism. So much celebrating of work ethic and calling and ambition and earning ones way to God’s graces. And while this didn’t make a lot of sense to me, I was an early believer in beauty and chilling, I absorbed more than enough of this aspirational believing that I have spent a jolly good part of my life tangling with this worker bee mindset.

For the longest time I couldn't seem to get past the idea that my self worth was tied to how productive I was being and how much money I was making. Now that I’m 63 and have found myself slowing down my ‘worker’ life, I have watched this old mindset continue to want to set the agenda and my self worth.

I was sitting down to write a couple mornings ago and I was feeling a bit foggy and had the thought why don’t I feel more clear about what I want to write about? This is a very familiar internal dialogue for me. And as soon as I wrote these words down I found. myself writing, ‘why not embrace meandering and muddling along?’

Now in sharing this, it may not feel like a big deal. But I don’t think I have ever really considered that meandering and wandering around was something I could actually appreciate unless it was getting me somewhere more meaningful. What I can say is since having this riff with myself, life looks just a bit different. I can now catch myself going off on some tangent of what should I be doing next and have a chuckle, even appreciating the near absurdity of the ongoing search for something better.

All to say, ‘The Idler’ mag glows that bit more and feels closer to my own religion than the Presbyterian sanctity of work I had been thrown by my family and culture. And the coast sanctuary is a perfect place to be and to be idling.