I may make this a thing.
Walking distance
“Everything is within walking distance if you have the time.”
—Steven Wright
I’m skeptical of nagging technology and tracking technology, but my Fitbit has kept me from turning into a gigantic lump on book tour. Here’s David Sedaris in his essay, “Stepping Out,” collected in Calypso:
I was travelling myself when I got my Fitbit, and because the tingle feels so good, not just as a sensation but also as a mark of accomplishment, I began pacing the airport rather than doing what I normally do, which is sit in the waiting area, wondering which of the many people around me will die first, and of what. I also started taking the stairs instead of the escalator, and avoiding the moving sidewalk.
The other morning I hit 10,000 steps before 10AM. I took a walk along Lake Michigan and decided to walk to my train at Union Station.
You hit 10,000 at 10AM and you can feel smug for the rest of the day!
The trouble with being lazy
“We do not know today whether we are busy or idle. In times when we thought ourselves indolent, we have afterwards discovered, that much was accomplished, and much was begun in us.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Experience”
During several interviews on this tour, I have joked about how enormously lazy I really am. During a phone interview yesterday, Daniel Boscaljon lightly pushed back. As an article in Psychology Today put it, “Laziness should not be confounded with procrastination or idleness.”
I’m a big fan of productive procrastination: a kind of promiscuous working in which I procrastinate on one project by working on another, sometimes switching between two or more projects until all the projects are done.
I’m also a practitioner of intentional idleness: blocking off time in which I can do absolutely nothing. (Like Terry Gilliam, I would like to be known as an “Arch Idler.”) “Creative people need time to just sit around and do nothing,” I wrote in Steal Like An Artist. (See Jenny Odell’s How To Do Nothing, Robert Louis Stevenson’s An Apology for Idlers, Tom Hodgkinson’s “The Idle Parent,” Tim Kreider’s “The ‘Busy’ Trap,” etc. )
Finally, I’m a huge believer in the benefits of boredom.
All that said, I can’t shake the feeling that, no, really, deep down I’m enormously lazy, and as much as I love to do my work, “I really love to lay around on my ass / Totally watching television.”
Rubbing the right way
I had the rare free morning on tour in Chicago yesterday. It was cold and a little gloomy but it wasn’t raining. Good walking weather. The city was really rubbing me the right way. (So I rubbed it back.)
Lake Michigan was a perfect emerald green. I thought of Amy Krouse Rosenthal, who made her home here, and her “Plan Be”: “existing only in the present.”
And I thought of the photo hanging in the Chicago Public Library of Kurt Vonnegut holding his library card.
The Emperor’s New Clothes
Yesterday, I was looking at this Stairway to Nowhere in my hotel — the kind of “luxury” hotel with lots of fancy finishes and no ice in the ice machine — and I was thinking about the news, and Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Emperor’s New Clothes” came to mind, as it often does these days:
Many years ago there was an Emperor so exceedingly fond of new clothes that he spent all his money on being well dressed. He cared nothing about reviewing his soldiers, going to the theatre, or going for a ride in his carriage, except to show off his new clothes…
“It’s strange people think they need Arendt or Orwell to figure things out,” Jeet Heer tweeted not long ago, “when everything was spelled out in ‘The Emperor’s New Clothes.’”
The story was published almost two centuries ago, in 1837, along with “The Little Mermaid,” as the third installment in Andersen’s Fairy Tales Told for Children. You might remember the child shouting out the truth, but you might not remember the whole ending:
“But he hasn’t got anything on,” a little child said.
“Did you ever hear such innocent prattle?” said its father. And one person whispered to another what the child had said, “He hasn’t anything on. A child says he hasn’t anything on.”
“But he hasn’t got anything on!” the whole town cried out at last.
The Emperor shivered, for he suspected they were right. But he thought, “This procession has got to go on.” So he walked more proudly than ever, as his noblemen held high the train that wasn’t there at all.
After I finished the story again, I thought of 16-year-old climate change activist Greta Thunberg, whose autism informs her approach: “I don’t fall for lies as easily as regular people, I can see through things.”
To the politicians, she says: “You don’t listen to the science because you are only interested in the answers that will allow you to carry on as if nothing has happened.”
But will anybody listen? Will anybody change? “Is my microphone on?” she asks.
Children are able to see through our bullshit, but if we don’t respect them and listen to them, we learn nothing from them, and nothing changes. The Emperor is allowed to proceed, because “the procession has got to go on.”
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