The Lost Art of the Idle Moment
Just what’s so urgent?
You have to wonder. Especially when the concert-goer seated across the aisle can’t wait for the music to end to call in a review. He suddenly lifts his cell phone in the general direction of the stage then announces: “This is beeee-yooo-tee-ful!” into the tiny mouthpiece over the thrumming drum and bass.
And what’s so crucial that the “business meeting” to settle it has to take place next to you at the candlelighted trattoria, a 90-minute shout-fest on a cell phone, full of expletives and wild gestures at 10 p.m. on a Saturday?
Why must the beeper go off during the benediction? And, while we’re at it, what’s the deal with the laptop at the movies?
Is all this so pressing that none of it can wait?
In a “multi-tasking” culture that has required us to become increasingly mentally ambidextrous, it was only a matter of time before even our in-between moments would become amped-up and maxed-out.
Think back. Consider the last time you sat in a public space and just stared into nothingness--no newspaper, cell phone or breakfast burrito ingredient list to accompany you. The last time you just lingered. Or wandered. Not asking for the correct time, not tapping your foot. Just letting your brain take its cool-down lap, allowing time to unspool and possibility to bloom.
For decades, we Angelenos have been keen to prop ourselves up as the capital of the open-ended options and unfettered time. The Southland is dotted with metaphors for the region’s half-speed life and knock-about philosophy, from the happenstance of exotic gardens in the hidden nook of a foot-trail, to flip-flops. We had so much to spare. Like the French flaneur, passing the hours pleasantly against picture-perfect backdrops, we knew that reveling in idle time was not only a necessity but an art.
And now, it’s an art somehow forgotten. As the long, formerly lazy days of summer approach, it’s become increasingly evident that even laid-back L.A. has become caught up in the willy-nilly push to press furiously forward.
Lazy bedroom communities once known for their low-gear distractions--the protracted picnic or the twilight family barbecue--have been overrun by the increasingly repetitive thicket of fast-food ghettoes. Worse, they now boast “express” versions of well-known casual dining restaurants, offering a sort of “greatest hits” menu, an edited, speeded-up version of themselves for the go-getter who hasn’t the time to suffer the extraneous.
This fast-forward press has even reached what seemed to be the region’s very last outpost of time standing still: the corner Suds ‘N’ Shine. Once ruled by the pace and sensibilities of sauntering men in golf caps, Cigarillos and circular conversation, the carwash, too, has gone the way of the hyperkinetic cyber-cafe, crowded with screaming cell phones and impromptu meetings on the fly.
In the eight to 12 minutes from vacuum to Armor All, the carwash was one of the region’s best repositories of the beauty of the stolen moments, a safe tuck-away. It was often christened with some awkwardly poetic conflation of street names at the nearest intersection--”The HollyMont” “The GlenMar”--nostalgic labels for a distinctive oasis. With its murmuring machinery, sighing suds and cascading water jets, it was as effective as a perfumed day spa or desert retreat for winding down from a particularly soul-deflating week.
Suspended between one errand and the next, briefly car-less, the burdened or the frazzled knew that the carwash provided an alibi--or at least a respite. It didn’t offer quite enough time to dip into a “pending” file or pull out the papers to grade. It spun out a meandering string of moments that could be unaccounted for without guilt or anxiety. The brain was free to happen upon a pool of blank space, to bask in it, fantasize or meditate, face turned to the sun.
But we wax nostalgic.
As that version of the carwash slips away, so have other similar pockets in the day: the oil and lube, the Laundromat, the wedge of time between the popcorn line and the coming attractions. Gyms and cafes have gone from stop-time islands to workplace annexes. “I don’t get these people with their scripts, on their cell phones with their lattes, talking about nothing! ‘Whatcha doin’? ... Whatcha gonna do later ...,’” groused one downtown-type frantically looking for a place to duck out. “They just want to be part of the noise.”
Those small scraps of time were the equivalent of a deep breath. They kept you clear and focused. Objective, if not hopeful. And now that they’ve vanished, we buy books telling us how to reinvent them.
“You have to take it when you get it,” says New York-based writer Veronique Vienne, author of “The Art of Doing Nothing: Simple Ways to Make Time for Yourself” (Potter, 1998) and the upcoming, “The Art of the Moment” (Potter, 2002). “Even if it’s 30 seconds. We have the meter on all the time. We are always counting the minutes. We are obsessed with production things we ‘have to do.’ We’re under pressure to conform. And all of it lives under our skin.”
Synching up our lives with everyone else’s, and just keeping up--with everything--can easily blur into a full-time pursuit. But unscheduled time is like an uneasy pause in conversation. People just can’t stand it. “We are afraid to be failures,” says Vienne, “but we have to argue with our guilty feelings.”
If time feels different--faster--these days, that’s because in some essential way it is, says L.A.-based psychologist A. Scott Greer. “One of the things that I see is that the whole concept of time has changed,” he says. “You would write a family member a letter and say ... ‘I’ll see you in the spring.’ ‘I’ll see you in a year.’ If you survived disease, the elements, then it was, ‘I’ll see you at the end of the month.’ Now it’s ‘I’ll see you on Tuesday.’ We have the impression that we, too, must move faster.”
But, really, how much faster must we be, asks Greer, who spends a good amount of time counseling the anxiety-ridden and sleep-deprived: career-track singles burnt out by voracious overwork and slim rewards; parents who have figured the answer to their family’s extracurricular activities is not to cut down but chart it all on Excel spreadsheets.
“When I raise the question of what do you do in your leisure time, I get a blank look,” he says. ‘What does that mean?’ They’ve bought into the advertising. My computer needs to be faster. I need a new Palm Pilot. I need the DSL line.
But in L.A., especially, if you look at educated, career-oriented people, they feel they need the neatest, newest, fastest.” It’s image, impression, he explains. “People don’t know how to sit quietly. They feel guilty. Patients say they don’t want to be perceived as old-fashioned or lazy. They’re worried that they will be left behind or that their status will go down.”
As we master “multi-tasking,” we forget that doing five things simultaneously was once known as “being overwhelmed.” Nowadays, if someone heaves a heavy sigh and says, “I worked two 16 hours days!” it isn’t necessarily a complaint, but might well be an inverted boast. We define ourselves by the number of hours clocked, destination points hit, extra errands we can squeeze in--but to what end?
Maybe today’s overreachers are in some way overreacting to early ‘90s slackers, those poorly postured shadows in plaid who sat around with vacant stares. But slacking wasn’t necessarily a bad thing.
We forget we need to be both busy and idle. “All intellectual improvement arises from leisure,” said the great idler Dr. Samuel Johnson.
And Aristotle, who made a point of pondering, believed that happiness depends upon leisure. “For we occupy ourselves so that we may have leisure, just as we make war so that we may live in peace. “
The route back to balance? “Learn to enjoy certain journeys,” Greer says. “Learn how to do something with your hands. I don’t mean idling in front of the computer screen, or going to the gym [and] riding the bike reading the Wall Street Journal or watching CNN. That’s really a problem.”
And there is a solution. “The issue is not to be so driven and compulsive about using every moment,” says Harriet Braiker, author of “The Disease to Please: Curing the People-Pleasing Syndrome,” (McGraw Hill, 2000). “You can’t possibly keep up. People tell themselves, ‘I’ll relax after I’ve finished everything I have to do.’ They tell themselves that downtime is a luxury after you finish. That’s a wrongheaded way. Downtime is what’s important to do. We have this sense that time is precious,” says Braiker, and valuing it properly means realigning our perceptions and seeing the worth of--and possibilities in--emptiness.
“If you give yourself a little time,” says Vienne, “your subconscious will suggest a solution.”
You just have to know where to start.
On a recent Sunday morning at a neighborhood Suds ‘N’ Shine, sure enough, the breezeway was busy with chino-clad execs clicking through their online portfolios. Women in sleek Sunday sheaths chattered into their palms. But holding court, as always, were the Cigarillo guys, in golf caps and short sleeves, who know that as life hurtles by on the interchanges and four-levels, there should and will always be a place to go to study and perfect the art of the lean.