Productive Idleness is Not An Oxymoron
The last couple of months have been a tornado of work and travel. I bounced from California to northern Colorado to Utah to Boston to Maine. After hectic (but fun) times like these, I find myself in an urgent state of mind. Even after the deadlines are met and the to-do list is under control, that uncomfortable sense of urgency sticks around. It feels like I’m barely present, just tripping into the future. But in order to be most creative and do my best work, a sense of spaciousness is needed.
How do I invite back a sense of spaciousness and ease? Well, I recently I went on a three-day backpack into the Weminuche Wilderness with three amazing women. The weekend confirmed what I knew already: Wild places keep me sane. We traveled through a giant cirque of ragged peaks empty of human beings. We discovered hundreds of chanterelle mushrooms at the peak of freshness and whole hillsides alive with wild strawberries. We watched storms move in and out and had time to just sit. Just watch the insects move around, the white fluffy seeds of plants waft about, and the tiny filaments of spider webs glint in the sunlight.
This is incredibly restorative. On one of my long sits, I realized: The diastole is just as important as the systole. Just like your heart contracts and then expands to fill with blood, we must flex and recover. In this industrial society, we have mistaken human beings for machines, expecting ourselves to maintain productivity at a steady clip all the time. But human beings don’t work that way. We are cyclical animals, beings made up of a host of processes. Even though I know this deeply, I seem to continually need to remind myself.
So the question is: How do you honor the diastole? How do you recharge that creative tank? And how do you do it without feeling guilty and without feeling the weight of the bullshit cultural assumption that you should be as consistently productive as a machine? For me, that means letting go of the constant sense of urgency and embracing idleness as a critical part of the creative cycle. (This is still a work in progress.) It means allowing myself to read for hours without feeling like I should be doing something else. It means wandering in the woods, marveling at peaks and lakes and flowers and insects, without a real destination or purpose. And of course, it means allowing myself to focus on being and not doing. I know well that the time for purposeful action will inevitably come around—and that I’ll be ready.