It was an inability to stop that led to my flattening a small child. I was doing that thing where you go to cold places and hurt yourself – skiing, I think it’s called – and was so overwhelmed at for once being able to progress in the desired direction that I overlooked the necessity to arrest my momentum on encountering an infant. His lower limbs parted company with the snow and there was a feeble puffy thud and then tears (from him as well). I squeaked out a “Je suis desolé” believing this might effect a rapprochement. His mother replied, with added ice: “We are Swedish.”
For all sorts of reasons, then, stopping is good. It’s just a pity that we’re getting so bad at it. Our holidays, once oases of calm and gentle artery-clogging pursuits, are increasingly becoming infected with activity. “Gone are the days when people want to return from holiday feeling sluggish with waistbands that little bit tighter,” says a man who might have a commercial interest in saying so. To which the only sensible response is: “Maybe so, but those days were better.”
We’re kidding ourselves that a constant diet of Doing Stuff is good for us. The opportunities for exertion have never been greater: one website urges already overworked wage slaves to “boost your cardio with a run or a high intensity circuit and choose a combination of wellness activities including TRX suspension training”. If that’s a little too sedentary, you could always try some “aquarobics, yogilates, wall-climbing, Pilates and stretching”. It’s as if the aim of life is to make each moment worthwhile (a fallacy for which I’m not sure whether to blame Rudyard Kipling or Paul Daniels). And it’s nonsense: if you fill the unforgiving minute with 60 seconds’ worth of distance run, all the flipping time, then yours is probably a sore ankle – and, what is more, you’ll probably be really annoying.
Did the Reformation happen for nothing? Do we still believe that our value as human beings is in what we do, that we can buy self-worth and self-esteem? Even ostensibly doing nothing isn’t regarded by some as enough any more: witness the rise of mindfulness, a tremendously beneficial discipline for many but one that makes even sitting down quietly into a focused activity. Not every moment needs to be spent in the pursuit of self-improvement.
I sometimes feel bad about the amount of time I spent playing terrible computer games in my youth. I quite possibly became world class at Emlyn Hughes International Soccer, but for what? If I’d spent as much time studying Shakespearian sonnets as I spent on Tracksuit Manager, a professorship somewhere would surely be mine. Years of F1 on the Megadrive left me with nothing but a dangerous misapprehension about how to actually drive (to which my three failed driving tests are testament). But when tempted to regret, I remind myself: no, that’s actually just what I wanted to do. It wasn’t about anything other than fairly tame enjoyment of the moment. Parents pushier than mine might have marched me over to the Boys’ Brigade or some extra-curricular Greek class, but I’m glad they didn’t.
My favourite moment on that unfortunate skiing trip – which was nine years ago and remains my only such adventure – was when a Frenchman named Tomas rubbed some jelly into my knee and then attached electrodes to it, in a session disconcertingly called a “seance”, before informing me sombrely that I was not to ski for two weeks. I’d sprained my knee and so got to spend the rest of the holiday drinking hot chocolate and eating waffles in mountainside cafes. It did me no good at all and all the good in the world.
“Wasted hours, before we knew where to go, and what to do,” sang Arcade Fire mournfully a few years ago on an album that deals emotively with our apparently increasing desire to fill in every gap in our lives. Time wasted can be time well spent, so let’s stop – before we flatten ourselves.
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