I need to take my sweet time ...
and I bet you do too...
Dear Creative Soul,
In 2018 I had the honour of interviewing Australian writer Robert Dessaix at the Perth Festival Writers Week about his book, The Pleasures of Leisure. It was an entertaining and enlightening conversation about a topic that challenges many - mastering our time by reclaiming the pleasure in leisure, both for its own sake, or to enrich our human-ness.
“When we actually find ourselves with a couple of hours a week or even the rest of our lives to spend precisely as we please, most of us don’t know what to do with the unoccupied time.” - Robert Dessaix, The Pleasures of Leisure
Too often, he writes, when we are given the gift of “vacant time”, we find ourselves scrolling on tiny screens or mindlessly watching bigger ones. We simply don’t know how to use this time. What to DO with it. Should we take up a hobby? Clean something? Start baking? Do some online shopping for things we don’t really need?
“Why, when vacant time opens up for us, are we so clueless about what to do with it?” - Robert Dessaix, The Pleasures of Leisure
We have been conditioned to think we have to “kill time”, to fill the “time void” with doing. With busy-ness. With something, anything. And when we do, we pat ourselves on the back for being busy. Productive. Worth more. We’re not sitting around doing nothing. Wasting time. Lazy. Worth less.
What a crock. You know this and I know this, right? Work is not the only thing that gives our life meaning. And I’m not saying anything new here. There’s so much research and discussion and writing on the stress of constant busy-ness and the need for greater work-life balance, reduced mental loads and shorter work weeks …
… but if we had more “vacant time” to do as we please, how many of us really know how to use it well?
Without guilt.
Without our inner critics giving us grief.
Without “killing time”.
If you’re anything like me, you know the struggle that comes with letting go of the “work first, then play” mentality. It’s real. And all too easy to become enslaved by busy-ness even when you don’t want to be. The need to fill time is insidious.
“… there is little that can be done immediately about the materialism fuelling the general addiction to work, but new ways of thinking about magnifying the time that’s our own should be possible, as should good ways for us to fill it.” - Robert Dessaix, The Pleasures of Leisure
Include play in your day
Dessaix argues that we need to “reclaim our right to ‘rest well’, and to loaf, groom, nest and play”. We need to include play in our day - not just for material gain, but for the joy it brings us. For enrichment of life - so we can be fully human, creatures who play and work and rest and BE.
I love these words from Dessaix - the pausing and wallowing in puddles and pools of time:
“A liberating way to view time, I find, is as splodges lying in clusters all around me. Instead of hopping obediently from link to link along a chain toward extinction, I pause in a puddle of it here and wallow in a pool of it there.”
― Robert Dessaix, What Days are For - A Memoir
Pause and wallow. These words remind me of the time I picked up my boys from school one particularly wet afternoon - the car park was a lake, the sky was heavy and dark, and no one wanted to hang around. On a whim, I took the boys back to the now-empty car park … and we let loose - we ran, jumped, splashed and squealed in that lake until we were cold, tired and happy. We could have used that time so differently - homework, cooking, cleaning - but we chose the puddle instead.
But most of the time, I’m not that good at choosing to wallow and soak in vacant or unplanned free time. I’m the person who gets bored when the hairdresser is washing my hair because, at that moment, I have nothing to do but stare at the ceiling.
Doing nothing is not as easy as it sounds.
After I interviewed Dessaix, I wrote him this email: “As someone who has always "filled in time" but has been learning to "just be", I appreciated your thought-provoking book and conversation - it reminded me that life is not about doing as much as possible, but experiencing as much as possible, even if that experience is merely basking in the light of a fading day.“
That was six years ago. Sigh.
I’m still learning to “just be”.
I’m still …
Relaxing into relaxing
This week, I was given the gift of time, the healer. A week off from work to recover from thumb surgery. A week to rest and heal. But it took days to shake off the need to fill time. It wasn’t so bad on the weekend, when my husband was home and he made sure I rested. But on the Monday he went to work, leaving me to oversee a tradesman who had come to replace all our internal doors. It’s hard to do nothing when someone is doing something, to be idle in the shadow of someone else’s labour (yes, even when you are supposed to be resting).
A day or so later, I came across this post by Jessica Becker of
:
Jessica writes that she longs to be “content with the birdsong and fresh air pouring through the open window, a blanket on my lap, my teacup drained, wanting nothing but another cup of tea and to just live in this spot forever.”
Me too, I thought. It took a little longer to realise that I was still looking at this healing time as time to kill, rather than as sweet time to pause, rest, play. Time to fill in meaningful ways.
Whoa.
The universe had dropped sweet, unscripted time into my lap and I was about to let it blow away like dandelion seeds on the wind. I’ve done that before, back in 2011 when I had six months off work for chronic shoulder, neck and arm pain related to overuse and stress. I saw this time of rest and recovery as idle time and so I found ways to do something to show that I was still productive and valuable.
The word idleness often has negative connotations. Idleness is seen as lazy and unproductive, but it also means simply not working. Dessaix puts it to readers that learning to be fill time (rather than kill it or working for the sake of it) is “the very enactment of who you have most strongly felt yourself to be”.
In other words …
when you relax into relaxing,
when you take the time to feel the time,
to be in the time,
to be idle in a good way
you’ll get to the heart of who you are.
The beating, raw heart of you
So, this week I have taken my sweet time and:
Completed two beautiful, mindful jigsaw puzzles
Baked a German almond cake
Had longer-than-usual conversations with friends and family
Planted basil, rainbow chard, and marigolds
Baked ciabatta (twice) using a quick no-knead recipe that really works!
Saved a broad bean plant and chilli I found in the clearance section of the local nursery
Picked the first of our juicy lemons
Brewed many pots of Moroccan Mint tea
Curled up in a chair and read chapters of Weathering by
, The Milkwood Permaculture Living Handbook byLay on the lounge and read chapters of A Cacophony of Bone by
Written a haiku (plus revised a chapter of my long-suffering manuscript)
Painted watercolour flowers
Completed a basic watercolour tutorial
Signed up for a bunch of Domestika watercolour courses
Bought a copy of Watercolour for the Soul by Sharone Stevens
Eaten an ice-cream with my feet in the water at the beach
Lay on my back and looked at birds
Listened to a friendly magpie carol less than a metre from my hand
Stared out the window, an empty cup of tea in my hand.
While there were practical and beneficial aspects to many things I did, there’s a lot of leisure in there - resting, nesting, loafing about, play. And the more of that I did, the more relaxed I felt about it. Which has got to be good for my healing journey, right?
I’m back to my day job on Monday, and a few months of hand therapy will have to fit into my week. But I’m glad I took the sweet time given and learned from it. May the lessons continue!
When life gives you an unexpected gift of time, what do you do with it?
PS. For more on this topic, I highly recommend this poetic post from
.
La Muse: Pausing to Wonder is a gift of words and will continue to be free for all readers for the foreseeable future. However, if you feel led (and able) to support my writing financially, there are a couple of options: 1) Buy Me a Coffee, which is a one-time “tip” as a way to say thank you, or 2) subscribe at one of my paid tiers if you wish to provide ongoing support. You can also recommend my Substack to other readers.
Either way, I am grateful that you have chosen to be here today, to be part of my community of readers and writers pausing to wonder (and wander). Let's keep connecting as a community and building each other up.
Love the idea of wallowing in puddles of time!
I used to be good at relaxing and just pausing and enjoying the passing of time. But I noticed that since my daughter's birth I have lost that ability. I realise how wrong that sounds, but it's the truth. She is now 10 and I am trying to go back to my old ways :) because I want her to learn to be ok with doing nothing - no screen, no being entertained, nothing. Because I realise how important that is. It's good to be busy, but only if you're also good at doing nothing. Otherwise, it just leads to exhaustion and illness. But it's not easy...
Love this post, it is funny how hard it can be to relax into relaxing. Boredom can be a bitch until we can learn how to relax and be at peace with that boredom. It's good to remember that some of the best ideas are born in times of boredom too 😊