THE SWEETNESS OF DOING NOTHING
As summer uncertainly loiters around spring, I’m already angst-ridden with the severity of it. Even in its nascent stage, summer-tide is intense. It unsettles my ‘pitta’ constitution, but it is also a time when I judiciously grow. There’s a futility to knowledge made redundant by unremembered experiences. I’m prone to the same mistakes, but then the restoration begins - a process repeated, year after year.
One recent evening, as I brooded by the window, a sweet and distant memory came back to me. Of a clear night, when we were sitting on a log after dinner and a moon-drenched Sheryll was pointing out constellations to me. She chattering on and on, I leaning against her bony shoulders. Everything then receding in the background, and the magnificent stillness of the starlit sky taking our breath away. That was the kind of consuming stillness I wanted now.
I watched ‘Eat, Pray, Love’ for the second time; this time it seemed different. Isn’t it strange how every time you watch a movie again (or re-read a book), it throws things at you that weren’t there before? The movie or book doesn’t change, your perspective does. A favourite scene in the movie came up. The adorable Balinese healer, Ketut Liyer summing up happiness and balance for Liz: “People in Bali understand: in order to be happy you must always know where you are. Every moment. Right here is perfect balance; right at meeting of Heaven and Earth. Not too much God, not too much selfish; otherwise, life too crazy. You lose balance, you lose power.”
I’ve always craved a slow, disentangled life. Growing up, even in a miniscule two-room house, I used to cut myself off from the rest of the family on evenings that demanded quietude. Dad had gifted me a small cassette player with cute red speakers and a Jim Reeves ’36 Love Songs’ collection. I would turn down the lights and lose myself in the music. Those were the evenings that sustained me. It’s what the Italians call ‘Il dolce far niente’. The sweetness of doing nothing. Or rather as I see it, the sweetness of exquisite, quiet moments. Life might not be simple all the time; it unsettles us, demands participation. But a little Il dolce far niente from time to time, can make the days wonderfully ambrosial.
Being busy is good, until it turns into an ailment. With unconstrained moments scattered about like fallen flowers on a spring day, life feels gratifying, full. In his book, ‘Busy: How to thrive in a world of too much’, Tony Crabbe puts it thus: “Unless we regain the ability to notice, to savor, we will be sucked ever more into unrewarding and unsustainable busyness.” The question is: Do we want a simple, coherent life or an opulent, frenetic one?
As I write these lines perched on my favorite bench in the park, the sun is slowly dipping into the horizon and the ground around me is littered with little yellow flowers. In the subtle outlines of the evening, I find peace, quiet and healing. This is what my heart wants, this is what it aches for.
