Published: July 01, 2007 11:08 pm         

The Off Season: The difference between having nothing to do and doing nothing

After my yard was mowed, my weeds pulled and my tiny garden hoed, I sat on our back step listening to the birds, staring off into the woods and soaking in the sun. It’s not that I didn’t have other chores to do; instead, I chose to do nothing. There’s a difference between the two.

A month ago I watched a movie late into the night. It was about the life of Woody Guthrie, the folk-singer activist who rode the rails of the Great Depression from coast to coast, occasionally getting his head busted for trying to help unionize itinerant farmhands. In an early scene, Guthrie, who tried to eke out a living during the Dust Bowl days as a sign painter before doing much as a musician, was shown working on a grocer’s sidewalk sale board.

Around him, ragged, dirty, wide-eyed children watched as if his paint brushes were magic wands, spellbound by a man painstakingly working to make a dime.

I’m not going to preach a sermon here about how kids nowadays can’t sit still without their video games or televisions supplying instant entertainment; I’m sure that if I were still a kid, I’d probably be as hooked on my cell phone and shopping at the mall as any young, red-blooded American consumer is. But it seems to me that in our affluence, we have allowed our imaginations, our amazement at common, everyday wonders to atrophy. I think adults are as equally guilty of the same sin.

Doing nothing is indeed an art. Years ago, I read a poem by Walt Whitman called “Sparkles From the Wheel”; it has become a favorite of mine. In it, Whitman describes how he stops along a boisterous city street to watch a man sharpen knives on a whirring stone. Along with a group of young children, he is captivated by the sparkles coming off the stone as the “sharp-chinned” old man pressed the blade across it.

I remember doing much of that same kind of thing as a boy, myself. I was raised in a family that had pretty well banished the word “boredom” from its vocabulary. To tell my parents or grandparents that I was bored was an incredibly stupid thing to do; there was always yard work, or garden work, or house work to be done. So, as often as I could, I practiced the art of doing nothing, of tying knots in rope and wading the creek and getting my clothes filthy. Poet Robert Frost may have wished as an adult he could go back to his boyhood and once again be a “swinger of birches,” but before I ever knew Frost’s words, I had been a swinger of wild grapevines in my cousin Renee’s woods, performing stunts inspired by grainy black- and-white Tarzan movies from The Early Show.

I wouldn’t expect too many kids who are a fifth my age to run outside to try all I did as a reasonably fearless, often scabbed and bruised outdoors adventurer. I wouldn’t suggest they fall out of their tree house, pole vault onto an old mattress with a sassafras limb, or wander a leech-filled branch. But I do have some suggestions for getting something out of doing nothing.

For instance, I’d like to see more kids read by flashlight under the covers at night when everyone else has gone to sleep. I’d like to see them build forts using kitchen chairs and old blankets. I’d like to know that they are lying in their back yards on cool nights watching the stars and wondering where people are going on those blinking lights they strain to see before they disappear into the blackness. I would hope more kids fish for bluegill with their grandpas and bake cookies with their grandmas.

I know that youngsters have standardized tests and braces and practices of some kind or another to get to, but more of them should be able to fry bacon and eggs on a fire they built after a near-sleepless night listening to the sounds of the woods. I’d like to see them explore more sandbars in shallow creeks and learn how to skip rocks. They should feel the mud squeeze between their toes, too.

Kids should still catch crawdads with strings; they should eat sun-warmed raspberries and blackberries just after they pick them themselves, even before they are washed. They should learn how to carefully open and close a pocket knife, and they should whittle. They should look for Indian beads, and they should hold a grasshopper in their hands.

Don’t get me wrong; learning how to work is important, too. But most of us learn how to do that early enough. Once we start earning a paycheck, doing nothing gets tougher, and it’s obvious that if the government has anything to do with it, we will work until we are very old or die at our desks or factory production lines. So I think we need to keep doing nothing at least some of the time before we forget how.

I hope that while kids are still kids, they look at spider webs in the morning light, that they watch the sun both come up and go down in the same day, and that they get to keep a box turtle for part of a summer. I hope they get to fly a kite, watch waves crash onto a shore, and hum. I hope somebody teaches them how to whistle.

I’d like to know that some of them are watching little garden plots where they have planted seeds, that they are getting to eat peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, and they’re still making ink out of the black juice of roadside walnuts. I want them to look very carefully at a bird’s nest. I want them to play in the dirt, and I hope they have a place where they can simply sit in the quiet and listen. They should look at the moon through a telescope and pond water through a microscope at least one time.

Since I am done writing this story, I think I will go back to doing nothing. I’m still pretty good at it.

Mike Lunsford can be contacted at hickory913@aol.com or through regular mail c/o the Tribune-Star, P.O. Box 149, Terre Haute, IN. 47808.