I have an admission to make. Over the last few weeks, a feeling has soaked through my mind and my body, and I just cannot ignore it.
Quiet. Considered. Careful. Minimalist. Simple.
No. There’s no way around it. There is one word, and one word alone.
I am feeling lazy.
It’s a bit embarrassing, to be honest. “How are you?” friends ask, after a few weeks of not seeing them.
“Um… lazy?”
That’s a ridiculous answer, but at least it’s an honest one. I wish I could say how full of vigour I am, and how many articles I’ve written and how many books and how much practice I’ve done and how much this and how much more that….oh, I realise I have done all that, but somehow laziness has snuck in around the edges and left a shadow in the bright bits. Laziness is my new best friend and he/she/they is/are telling me to lie down, to watch some rubbish tv, to have toast for tea, to not try and be witty or a clever clogs, but to just….be.
My life has become fallow.
It’s been a struggle (especially in a lazy state) to counteract the feelings of guilt, but then I realised, we should do this more! If a paddock needs fallow times, why don’t humans do it as well? I guess there’s long service leave, but that can often be taken up by flying around the world or driving around Australia or this type of business or that. True laziness, or lying fallow, just does the basics, and lets the rest run subconsciously, underground, improving the nutrients and the inspiration as the top layer of soil does… nothing.
And just as I was searching online for what actually does happen to soil when it lies fallow, I found this article about the need for humans to be fallow. Huh. Talk about the Zeitgeist. In a minimalist, lazy way of course.
Laziness, fallowness, it doesn’t mean a lack of effort, jut a choice of what to do put your effort into. And what you do do, do it in the easiest way possible.
So to make myself, and hopefully you too, in your fallow state, feel better, I’m going to finish this article with some quotes from geniuses — Einstein and Woolf and a dude called Pyotr Kropotkin, who amongst other things was a philosopher, economist, historian, geographer, and activist. Someone who clearly needed more fallow time.
“I think ninety-nine times and find nothing. I stop thinking, swim in silence, and the truth comes to me.” — Albert Einstein
“How much better is silence; the coffee cup, the table. How much better to sit by myself like the solitary seabird that opens its wings on the stake. Let me sit here for ever with bare things, this coffee cup, this knife, this fork, things in themselves, myself being myself.” — Virginia Woolf
“The monotony and solitude of a quiet life stimulates the creative mind.” — Albert Einstein
“In reading the biography of great men, we are struck with the number of "idlers" among them. They were lazy so long as they had not found the right path; afterwards they became laborious to excess. Darwin, Stephenson, and many others belonged to this category of idlers.” — Pyotr Kropotkin
Ed Ayres presents Weekend Breakfast on ABC Classic (Saturday and Sunday 6am – 9am).