The
Brady Archive
Idle
Thoughts
By
Robert Brady, (KJ
66)
This
is something you learn best out in the country, where time is measured
in sun, moon, stars and the size of leaves, where there are no schedules,
streets or 50th floors, no scramble intersections. When you move from
the city out into the countryside, further from the need for minute-hands
and closer to the actual time of day as quietly and naturally registered
on your consciousness by the entirety of sky, you begin to acquire the
ancient awareness that is inborn in us all and was once lifelong from
the start, that you are in charge of your time, as opposed to when you
agreed to a salary. The aboriginal employment arrangement is a very
different one, one we all yearn to practice — when we make our
million — when we retire…
But at whatever age, once in the wildflower meadow's thrall we begin
to perceive the aboriginal nature of idleness, the Eden of ideas. All
of history's great creators were masters of idleness, but they were
only idle to the busied eye. They were idle where it matters. One who
hasn't mastered the art of idleness has been living secondhand, without
a firsthand.
Idleness punctuates the new idler's life, gives it organic pace and
pause, imparts perspective on what once was a blur, enables snapshots,
moments of assessment and redirection, the creation of a mindmap of
the life's path, thus the idler learns of life from the inside, where
it's lived and where it happens, rather than from the outside, where
it is chronicled by a timeline of arrivals and departures.
It is a blessing now and then to stop mid-task, the way all deep tasks
are designed, sit back against a tall tree, the way all tall trees are
designed, and let the moment's momentum take its course as you ride
the timestream like a twig, letting eternity itself assert your part
in it.
When at last you return, you come bearing gifts.
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