I’m just at the end of a week-long holiday, which has been LOVELY, but I’ve got to admit I was looking forward to coming home towards the end. There’s just something about doing nothing which puts me on edge.
Whilst lounging about I came across a great article celebrating 10 years of The Idler magazine – a publication that embraces the art of purposeful loafing – which featured various bohemians talking about their lifestyles in context of their work. Not only did their rejection of a traditional office life elevate them to heroes in my eyes, it also made me rethink my growing impatience to all the downtime.
Each of the interviewees (Will Self, Michael Palin, Zadie Smith amongst them) talked about how ‘idleness’ was at the heart of their success. How the art of doing nothing – or more accurately, the art of making their creative passion their life’s work – was the key to their productivity.
To those of us with a 9-5, a life uninhibited by a ‘proper job’ sounds romantically ideal. But as the interviews reveal, a creative life isn’t an easy way out. It takes a certain strength of character and self-belief and motivation to take the path less expected.
The ultimate reward, though, is enviably ideal: a life defined not by a daily commute, a monthly wage, a yearly appraisal…but by the fruits of your own imagination. Withnail and I writer Bruce Robinson sums it up when he says that after a day’s work, if he’s produced even two lines of good material, he feels “justified in being alive”.
I’ve experienced a teeny degree of this recently, whilst beavering away to set up my new creative business after years of talking about it. I’d reached a little lull in motivation before my holiday – probably because I’ve spent most of my waking minutes of the past few months thinking/dreaming/doing it. But in the shadow of an Italian lake which has been the inspiration for writers and poets for over a century, I started yearning to get back and crack on with it.
Without all the downtime I wouldn’t have had the perspective to know that I am doing the right thing, the reassurance that beginning to forge a way out of the ‘working world’ by indulging my passion has been worth the effort I’ve spent so far. So whilst doing nothing has, at times, proved a hard task, in the life of my fledgling business those lazy, unproductive hours may just count as amongst the most important.
The Hobbyist 