It was a long break that must have been quite back-breaking too to many. Not just work, but sitting idle endlessly before TV or gadget screens or criss-crossing bumpy, potholed streets to visit relatives or seeing recent releases could also strain your spines. So as workday dawned on Thursday and meandered wearily into Friday en route to another weekend of marriages and movies, it was not surprising to see more reluctant faces than refreshed ones at the office. While holidays are an alluring, addicting habit, too much ‘rest’ can be tiring too!
I also feel lazy and hazy and in no mood to strain my grey cells. Not that I am putting them to good use in these columns, but I swear I try to wrack my brains to somehow make them work. Even that effort now fails for lack of, well, ‘effort’. Yet there is this pull and pressure of writers’ karma that eggs me, on while at the same time mocking at my impotence. I think Bertrand Russel or one or all of the usual suspects like Bernard Shah, Mark Twain or Sh’peare had written much in praise of idleness in identical moments. But if they so loved to be idle, why did they blow it by writing about it instead of just brooding on it? A similar paradox grips me though the comparison should ideally end there.
How do you define idleness? ‘Doing nothing’ is the simplest explanation that can be given by an, er, idle mind. Strive a bit more and we can probably include ‘just relaxing’, ‘no work, official or domestic’, ‘just sitting or lying down’ etc, etc. Or probably a state of being totally at rest, though not sick and certainly not the inevitable ‘eternal rest’. Or call it just physical tranquility. And this for a reasonably long duration that invites disapproval from those claiming to be not idle even for a second. In short, it is any kind of inaction which is also the opposite of action. In that respect, ‘nothing’ is not impossible, if you get the drift!
But is total idleness a possibility at all? If even thought is deemed action, as many philosophers and faiths do, idleness is a myth. And if action results as a direct consequence of a thought during ‘idleness’, then the idleness becomes action, with retrospective effect. And since humans are prone to act, if not in honourable intent at least for the heck of it, every idle thought has the potential for action. And we know by instinct that thoughts can be infectious too prompting action in others. Suffice to say that all human output, developmental or destructive, down millenia have their seeds in idle minds because thought is pervasive and permanent in life.
Neuro-sciences narrate in great detail the frantic activity that goes on in the brain, what ever the physical state and even in a comatose stage. Then there are dreams, day or night, sweet or sour, about which religious debates and scientific researches make huge claims of hectic brain and thought activity, almost equating them to an alternative reality. Those who wake up in a sweat (not the power-cut induced one) after being pushed into free-fall by a four-headed demon down a black hole are unlikely to relish this ‘idleness’. Of course, we hear that yogis of yore and mystics of many religions can reach the level of thoughtlessness which is touted as the highest spiritual target. But that is not described as idleness. It is called bliss in that parlance. But, for us ordinary mortals all such ideals can only be idle talk.
Idleness can be sublime as well as ridiculous. Some of those great thinkers who are depicted with fingers on the forehead and chin in sepia photos or stone pedestals in thoughtful repose have their idleness imparted with purpose. But our post-independence politicos, whose idleness yields them tons of idle money, too love and ape that posthumous pose on statues even though the crows above find them more useful than the crowds that throng.
Idle minds are fertile fields: To the devilish, it is an evil workshop; to the devout it is a deity’s worshipful abode; to the diligent and dutiful, it is an arena for decisive action; to the dreamer it is a foundation for the future. For me it came handy to spin a yarn without an ounce of cotton. So thanks, readers, for sparing your idle time! I almost idled this week!
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