By Rachel Sauer
The Palm Beach Post
Summer morning. Lemonade sun arching up from the horizon. Open one eye, open the other. Yawn, stretch, toss back the sheets. Milk and cereal, bowl and spoon – breakfast. And then . . .
Nothing.
Nothing at all, a whole day of it.
Hours and hours tumbling over themselves, unfolding empty. The possibilities!
Something productive? Useful? Important? Nah.
A little goofing off instead.
Goofing off, a member of the piddling family, related to meandering and rambling, cousin of puttering, not far removed from drifting, roaming and wandering.
Summer days are made for this, for delicious purposelessness, for busyness without importance, planted firmly in the moment as the universe swirls in vivid color.
Goofing off: The forgotten art.
We’re so busy, aren’t we? All the time, going and going, grabbing and stretching and planning. Good grief, the planning! Play groups. Sports leagues. PDAs. Meals eaten in cars, with no drive-in movie in sight.
Dr. Geoffrey Godbey, a professor of leisure studies at Pennsylvania State University, says we – Americans – have never been comfortable with the idea of leisure. Efficiency! That’s the ticket.
“Everything is done as a means to an end,” he says. “And it actually robs many things of the pleasure of doing them.”
And everything with its label. Even daydreaming is now called “creative waste,” and those more progressive bosses encourage, say, 15 minutes of it per day as a means of letting the subconscious do its magic toward . . . work!
(Yes, work is good. No, civilization wouldn’t exist without it. Yes, goals are necessary and excellent.)
But enough.
Enough!
Enough of the frenzy and stress, of living one step beyond the one being taken, of stuffing our minutes full of busy. Consider what Aristotle said about leisure, that it’s the absence of a necessity of being occupied.
Consider goofing off.
Is there greater joy? Author Robert Paul Smith remembered it in his 1957 memoir of childhood “Where Did You Go?” “Out.” “What Did You Do?” “Nothing.”
“All of us,” he wrote of himself and his friends, “for a long time, spent a long time picking wild flowers. Catching tadpoles. Looking for arrowheads. Getting our feet wet. Playing with mud. And sand. And water. You understand, not doing anything. What there was to do with sand was let it run through your fingers. What there was to do with mud was pat it, and thrust in it, lift it up and throw it down.”
The tools of goofing off? A shovel, with which to dig a great big hole. A stick, with which to poke things. Duct tape, because there’s nothing better. A box, a pile of used lumber, a sack of fabric scraps, a new book, an inflatable pool toy, a barn, some rocks.
The spirit of goofing off? From eighth-century Chinese poet Wang Wei: “No plans all day, just time and silence. Nothing stops you gazing and dreaming.”
Goofing off is not to be confused with horsing around. Horsing around often leads to roughhousing, which frequently leads to injury: knees skinned, fingers jammed, ankles sprained. The omnipresent threat of losing an eye.
Nor is goofing off laziness, or even idleness (though it can be, if idleness is what’s called for in that particular moment). Goofing off is simply doing, for no particular reason. Or doing nothing at all (though there’s no such thing, Godbey says: “There’s letting things happen as opposed to making them happen”).
“The idea of (goofing off) represents a huge kind of trust in the world, a huge kind of trust in being alive,” Godbey says. “It says, ‘I am alive, life is given to me.’ It’s having almost no doubt that the world is unfolding as it should, or unfolding well enough.”
Goofing off is poking around a creek with a stick for hours, and floating in a pool, and doing somersaults down the stairs until someone gets in trouble. Occasionally it leads to a goal – building a tree house, finishing the sand castle. Sometimes it’s boring.
(Oh, yes it is. Lest we forget the sometimes stultifying boredom of summer, the languid, idea-free hours, the whaddle-I-do of it all.)
It is still or frenzied, goofing off, depending on the day. It is sprinting somewhere for no reason, only because that burst of speed feels good. It is making up a dance, or inventing a ridiculous game, or seeing what happens when . . . It is sitting under a tree, or lying beneath the stars, or catching a fish from a canal.
Roman poet and philosopher Lucretius wrote:
“Why! Men can lie on soft turf side by side under a tall tree’s branches near a stream,
and easily, pleasantly, care for creature needs –
especially when the sun shines, and the year in season sprinkles the fresh green grass with flowers.”
Now: There’s still time in the day. Put down the newspaper. Go and do, or don’t. Stay where you are, perhaps.
Goofing off is just that simple.