To be idle and blessed: thoughts on the NY Times article “The ‘Busy’ Trap”

“You’ll get to be really good at just sitting”, a fellow volunteer recently told me. “I can spend hours just sitting outside.” He’s been here in Madagascar a year longer than I have, so I took him at his word. But I didn’t really understand what he was talking about until yesterday afternoon, when I returned home from a bike ride and found myself, just sitting, on a tsihy (straw mat) on the floor by my front door. I sat and watched the wind blowing through the huge mango tree in my backyard; watched the kids playing in the yard in the house next door, laughing and shrieking with delight; and listened to the jubilant songs being sung in the church past the rice fields. It was a quiet moment, and I embraced its stillness by simply letting myself be present and enjoy it.

Is this something I would have been able to do back home in the US? Perhaps, but enjoying a few minutes of nothingness is much easier to do when you’re not in the midst of a culture, like America’s, that tells us that there should be a something at every moment. And so that bit of time sitting on a straw mat made me think of the recent New York Times essay “The Busy Trap” that so many of my friends are posting on Facebook. The author makes a case for slowing down and actually allowing our free time to be just that—unscheduled, unstructured, unfettered with obligations. His central point is that most of the “busyness” we complain about is self-created out of anxiety over having an unfulfilled life, or feeling like we constantly have to advance ourselves, our career, even our children. I’m hardly innocent of this kind of thinking: back in New York, I constanly overbooked myself with volunteer work, five-day-a-week gym visits, charity events, social outings, and other agenda items, all on top of a 50- to 60-hour-a-week job, and a passion for cooking and baking that saw me making nearly all my own food from scratch. Multiple people told me that I did more with my free time than anyone else they knew—and this made me proud. Look at everything that I was accomplishing! After all, my impetus for treating my “spare time” as something to be filled was due to my appreciation for the very ephemerality of life. Our time on earth is short and precious, and so how better to squeeze the most enjoyment out of this gift of life than by filling my hours with projects and plans and worthwhile activities? But my overscheduling habits also contained a fear that I was wasting my time if I wasn’t accomplishing some task or bettering myself every weekend. I had to give myself permission just to sit and watch TV or do nothing, and even then I felt guilty doing so.

Things have changed considerably now that I’m here living in Madagascar. One main element of this shift is that my very being here is in itself an accomplishment, so mentally it’s easier to allow myself to slow down, because I know that the two years I’m putting in are, in fact, going towards a final goal of becoming the person I want to be. But another huge element is that I simply have no choice, because of the radically different lifestyle here. I do have more free time than I did back home, because I work fewer hours, don’t have a TV, and have to pay per megabyte to use the internet. But I also spend time on things that I’d never have to at home: I have to fetch water from a well, shop in the market every day, soak all my fruits and vegetables in chlorinated water, cook all of my food without the aid of running water, an oven, or a refrigerator, wash all of my clothes by hand, and lock my house and walk outside to my kabone whenever I need to go to the bathroom. And so this has redefined my notion of “busy”: when I’m not working, most of my time is spent on activities that allow me to simply exist. The same goes for nearly every single Malagasy person here. “Busy” means having to walk an hour to the market to sell fruit, with a baby strapped to your back. “Busy” is working all day in the rice fields, or harvesting vanilla, or going out in the ocean at dawn to find fish. “Busy” is going to the river to wash your family’s clothes by hand. “Busy” is walking 2 hours each way to school, oftentimes on an empty stomach. For most Americans, this is extremely far from our daily reality, because modern conveniences strip us of the tasks that should occupy our time: washing machines, refrigerators, freezers, prepared food, running water, automobiles, and the internet all mean that we don’t have to worry about the things that the rest of the world spends their time doing. And because we don’t have to worry about these things, we have a lot of time on our hands.

So what I will say is this: if we are fortunate enough to have extra time in our day, when our work is done and obligations to our existence met, then we need to allow ourselves to enjoy that as such. Embrace the stillness instead of trying to fill a void. I’ve been spending time just watching my cat discovering the world, playing with a butterfly or basking outside in the sunlight. I've been sitting on my front stoop and chatting with the neighborhood kids who stop by. I’ve also been walking and biking around my town, with no real direction, just soaking up the beauty and majesty of my new surroundings. In short, I’ve been practicing, to quote Mary Oliver’s famous poem The Summer Day, how to be idle and blessed.