Motu Piscine, Raivavae, Les Australes 26 May 2011, 8:00 a.m. Tahiti Time 23S53 147W37
We are still in Raivavae. This weather and this place are too perfect. We know many of the places ahead of us now, and Raivavae rivals them all – especially since the winds died down (over 2 weeks ago now). We’ve shared a stunning anchorage (near a motu across from the main island) with 4 other boats – 4 nationalities – ages ranging 6 months to 63 years – all really easygoing, neat people (an especially easy going baby with a great toothless smile which he uses often, like a new word discovered, he tries it out on us all). There’s a long sandy white beach in front of us, and at the point some decent snorkeling. We’re managing to keep on top of school, and get some hiking, diving, beachcombing, socializing, and sandcastle building in – all worthy activities, but not much writing, painting, or drawing, and only a little photographing, and reading. After all the projects in NZ, and the longer, tougher passage, it feels like we’re on vacation – but a very busy vacation – knowing that this weather will not last, this place will not last, every calm sunny hour feels like an hour we need to make count.
There was a thread of feminine nurturing terms in the writing I was reading before the sun came out for good. After “Journey is the midwife of thought,” from my last note, I read an article titled “Idleness the Mother of Possibility” by Sven Birkerts in the Lapham’s Quarterly (amongst a long list of articles I had downloaded to read offline). I’m probably not supposed to give away the final paragraph, but it’s an interesting summary to the article which touches on many historic literary takes on idleness. :
“Idleness is the mother of possibility, which is as much as necessity the mother of inventiveness. Now that our technologies so adeptly bridge the old divide between industriousness and relaxation, work and play, either through oscillation or else a kind of merging, everything being merely digits put to different uses, we ought to ask if we aren’t selling off the site of our greatest possible happiness. “In wildness is the preservation of the world,” wrote Thoreau. In idleness, the corollary maxim might run, is the salvaging of the inner life.”
This all weaves in with my earlier ruminations on solitary time and journeying. When you stop the journey, or the movement, idleness becomes the catalyst for converting thought into action. This boat life has long periods of idle time, punctuated by intense periods of activity. Even when we are not underway, there are still blocks of idle time in a variety of forms. There’s the rainy day kind of idle, the windy day idle, the staring at the lagoon-blue idle, the waiting-for-a-weather-window idle, the waiting-for-the-kids-to-finish-school-so-we-can-all-go-play idle. All can lead to idle curiosity, which is definitely a birthplace of possibility. But idle time can feel like wasted time. A BPS Research Digest Blog article titled “We’re Happier When Busy but our Instinct is for Idleness” states “Unless we have a reason for being active, we choose to do nothing – an evolutionary vestige that ensures we conserve energy.”
The balance between busy and idle is delicate. It’s not that there’s nothing to do out here: there’s school, there are 3 meals a day to plan, cook and clean around, there’s seeking out some physical activity to keep us all healthy, there are the eternal list of boat projects, there are social engagements when we’re near land, and on my more motivated days there is some creative pursuit. But the actions aren’t being lined up by others in an ever present email inbox. I no longer get that sense of productivity from deleting or filing an email that has been responded to. The actions are no longer scheduled in nice tidy blocks of time. Idleness is now my inbox. And Idle time does not exactly feel like productive time; it may be my new catalyst for actions, but that’s both an empowering and daunting concept. In my working life, there was some comfort in externally imposed tasks – if a particular action was not a worthy one, I had the fallback excuses of “just doing my job,” or “just being a team player.” Each action out here is of our own making or at least the result of our own choices, scheduled around a sometimes odd flow of a day dictated by weather and whim, and negotiated between the four of us. I’m now 100% accountable for my actions, and the impacts hit the most important people in my life.
I feel like our family happiness stakes are high, and I need to make each action or activity count, to set the best example, to keep life inspiring and challenging – when really I’d just like to set the mother in me aside, “conserve energy,” watch the sunset with a mai-tai in hand, and forget about “possibility” for awhile. Ah hell, who am I to fight the vestiges of evolution? Cheers!
xoxomo
More idle reading from my idle reading list:
An Apology for Idlers by Robert Louis Stevenson “Perpetual devotion to what a man calls his business, is only to be sustained by perpetual neglect of many other things.”
In the Lapham’s Quarterly article “The Mother of Possibility” (http://www.laphamsquarterly.org/essays/the-mother-of-possibility.php?page=all) he mentions: “Japanese Buddhist priest Yoshida Kenk whose Essays in Idleness, dating from the early fourteenth century, reflect on the immersed intensity of life lived apart from public agitations: “What a strange, demented feeling it gives me when I realize I have spent whole days before this inkstone, with nothing better to do, jotting down at random whatever nonsensical thoughts have entered my head.””
Also from the Lapham’s Quarterly article: “Michel de Montaigne’s Essays (1580), that cataract of shrewd humane psychologizing and now the source text for a vast, fertile genre, could be said to have taken its origin in this selfsame condition. Montaigne, who liked to see things not only both ways, but all ways, in his small early essay “Of Idleness,” first deplores it, writing of the mind that, “If it be not occupied with a certain subject that will keep it in check and under restraint, will cast itself aimlessly hither and thither into the vague field of imaginations.” But then, a few sentences later, reflecting on his decision to retire from the endeavors of the world, he reverses, says, “It seemed to me that I could do my mind no greater favor than to allow it, in idleness, to entertain itself.” He goes on to say how, in that freedom, mind “brings forth so many chimeras and fantastic monsters, the one on top of the other, that in order to contemplate at my leisure their strangeness and absurdity, I have begun to set them down in writing, hoping in time to make it ashamed of them.” And so from one man’s idleness is begotten one of the treasures of world literature.”