No More Lazy Days

Yesterday I had a rare treat at work. I was able to actually listen to a radio, or more accurately, someone else's radio. There was an oldies station playing, and I got into it, because 1) I have always liked oldies and 2) I am getting to be one!

At one point in the morning, the song "Lazy Day" popped on. "Lazy day..just right for lovin' away..."...it took me a moment to remember who sang it (Spanky and Our Gang, I think it was 1968 but I can't be positive). I instantly thought how ancient the song seemed, not because of its vocals or arrangement or even the instruments used. No, the reason it seemed so hopelessly out of date was the sentiment it was expressing.

"Lazy Day"...do you suppose any teenagers (or anyone for that matter?) have any clue as to what that is? Does anyone just laze away a bright sunny Saturday with a walk in the park or a long luxurious nap in a hammock? Does anyone just lay on the back and watch the clouds float by, and try to discern what their shapes look like?

I doubt it.

"Kick the can" has been replaced by soccer games and band practice and summer camps and summer school and field trips and extra credit. A kid's life is so organized and regimented anymore that he has no time to develop a real sense of individuality. Most of them practically live in the family car, excuse me, recreational vehicle, and the notion of just having a free day to bum around and laugh and talk and daydream seems unthinkable.

And to be fair, it's not just kids that are bereft of "downtime". I remember a lot of weekends where my folks just enjoyed the simplicity of sitting in lawn chairs and chatting with neighbors while listening to a ball game, or taking a leisurely ride for an ice cream cone or cruising the backroads of our little town, talking about old times and catching up on who had bought what house. Now the weekends are alive with the angry buzz of leafblowers and lawn mowers, a constant chorus of yard maintenance. And you can forget those leisurely drives in the country; now we all have to drive fifty miles to buy a truckload of junk we don't need anyway. And every other weekend is a birthday, a wedding, an anniversary, or a Hallmark holiday to observe. Even our downtime has become stressful!

Someone once described the hyperactivity of our modern society as the "quickening of the American pulse" and that's as good a term as any, I suppose. You just don't seem to see anyone doing..nothing...anymore. On the surface, that sounds like a good thing. We all like to think that productivity and labor are positives and they are. But is activity always necessarily positive and is leisure always negative?

Hardly.

There is a time for work and a time for play in our society; both have their place and purpose. But the scales seem to have become unbalanced to a point where anyone who isn't constantly building or cleaning or organizing or studying is immediately thought of as "lazy". I have no objection to hard work; it's how we all got whatever we have today. And unless you are a Hilton or a Rockefeller or someone similar, none of us can really live without work.

But the breaks from work are important too. They allow us to recharage our mental and physical batteries, to get some perspective on our daily labor and to pursue other interests that can help inform and bring insight to our "regular" jobs. But even in our leisure, we are all hyperkinetic. If you're not hiking or biking or jogging or doing something intensely physical, the old skeptical eyebrows raise once again. You're not "doing" anything.

I submit that "doing nothing" can be constructive. It's during those unscheduled times of leisure where we explore our own creativity and inner selves that we come up with ideas that can benefit our daily lives and also that give us perspective and distance from our daily grind. Anything, even the most beloved job, can become tedious and rote if you never escape from it.

While I don't have anything against more strenuous forms of leisure, the "do nothing" method is also helpful in giving us the time and the silence to appreciate the sheer joy of just being alive. You aren't burdened by concentrating on any task or accomplishing any goal, you are just breathing in the experience of being alive.

Work, effort and labor are all very laudable activities. And certainly everyone is entitled to their own form of leisure. But I do mourn the loss of simplicity, of "dreamtime" in our lives. Someone a lot more intelligent that me once observed that the unexamined life is not worth living; I wonder, in light of our frenetic activity addiction, if all that effort has a real goal or is just an ends unto itself.

There is indeed a lot to do and there is indeed a lot we can accomplish in the modern world. Perhaps our increased opportunity and freedom has placed upon us such heightened expectations that we now feel we are failures if we aren't constantly accomplishing something. I just hope we don't forget that no matter how far we advance, no matter how many opportunities are presented to us, everything has its limits. Life has its limits.

And while we are alive, we might as well stop and just silently, reverently, appreciate it once in a while.