I am passionate about gardening, and while it is one of my most energetic pursuits, I think of it as my most idle. When I garden, I am so lost in the moment that worry and stress simply fade away. I don’t garden to win awards for the perfect sweet pea or the most magnificent dahlia.
I do it because it brings me a tranquillity that nothing else can – and that is prize enough. It is my hobby, and always has been but, even as I write that word, I think how strangely old-fashioned it sounds. I suppose the modern euphemism is ‘me’ time.
A friend who is constantly consumed with stress and anxiety claims she takes plenty of me time. That means getting her hair done and having a facial and mani/pedi – preferably all at the same time. It’s not relaxation she’s after, but results – glossy hair, toned skin and a set of perfect, pearly nails.
Yoga is too slow for her, until I mention that Hollywood stars practise it to attain a perfect butt. Her eyes light up. Mention meditation and her eyes glaze over. ‘I couldn’t just sit still and do nothing. Anyway, I don’t have the time.’ This is a woman who runs every day and goes to the gym three times a week. Couldn’t she swap a couple of those sessions to meditate, which genuinely does reduce stress? No chance. She doesn’t exercise because she loves it. It is a chore, tolerated to keep her body lean and slim. For her, like so many others, pleasure has become goal-oriented.
I live by the sea and every morning the beach is crowded with people power-walking, iPods plugged in, so intent on burning calories that they miss the glories of a sun-silvered ocean and the cries of seagulls freewheeling through a blue sky. They are part of our Must Do generation. We must run to lose weight; we must read the latest book or see the newest movie, not necessarily for pleasure, but to have that well-informed phrase to drop into conversation. Saying you’ve idled away an afternoon planting seeds is likely to kill social chit-chat stone dead. As for doing a jigsaw puzzle or building model ships – it’s kid’s stuff.
If only it was. Hobbies – the delight of doing something for nothing – are an absorption left to small children making mud pies and building castles in the sand, but even those innocent pursuits are lost as shopping becomes this nation’s number one leisure activity. Pleasure these days is about getting, not being.
Whenever I mention to my daughter that I grew up without television (there was no such thing in the far-flung countries where I lived as a child), or computer games, mobile phones or Facebook, her expression is one of almost comic panic. ‘But what did you do?’
Well, nothing really. I made clothes for my dolls and, later, for myself – usually with equally disastrous results. I read to lose myself, wrote stories for amusement and went on two-hour bike rides, not to get anywhere, but simply for the exhilaration of the wind in my hair. I’m not saying it was an idyllic childhood; half the time I was bored out of my mind. But it taught me one thing. Pleasure is quiet and joy can be idle – which is perhaps why I am at my happiest making mud pies in my garden.
Come and meet Sally at our event, at 6.30pm on Thursday 3rd May 2012 – she’ll be in conversation with editor Louise Chunn, discussing life, love and how to survive it all. More information here.
Comments