How I Relearned the Art of Doing Nothing

In 2023, all Americans over age 15 reported spending an average of 23.4 minutes each day “relaxing and thinking,” the most since the survey started tracking the category in 2003. I calculated the annual average across the last 10 years (2020 was skipped due to the pandemic) to be 18.4 minutes. I also detected a clear-cut trend toward decade-over-decade increases, with the annual average inching from 17.7 minutes between 2003 and 2012 to 19.1 minutes since 2013.

True, we’re talking only a matter of minutes here. But mere minutes matter, too. What’s an hour without its 60 minutes or a day without its 1,440?

So now I’m on a quest to turn a little Italian. After all, many Italians customarily take a midday break, often involving pasta and wine followed by a long nap. They also traditionally take off most, if not all, of the month of August.

Just one problem: I’m American, not Italian. I grew up in a family of entrepreneurs, all of whom instilled in me, by example, a decidedly entrepreneurial mindset. It features the cornerstone credo that time is money. I came of age in the 1960s, justly known for the go-getter, gung-ho pursuit of professional success. Plus, I lived for 45 years in New York City, where I developed a decidedly New York City metabolism.

In short, I’m wired to think, act and work American. Once I got serious about my obligations, I came up with to-do lists for my to-do lists. I imagined myself composing emails to clients and colleagues in my sleep. I quickly discovered, as an American expat, how hard it can be to take it easy.

I’ve certainly tried. I’ve stared spellbound at our newborn grandson sleeping sweetly in his cradle. I’ve stopped on a walk just to admire grapes ripening in the sun and aspiring to turn into wine. I’ll take a deep breath now and then and savor the surrounding silence, stillness and solitude. In zoning out, I get away from it all and just let myself be. I forget myself long enough to find myself all over again. Such moments of peace reacquaint me, if briefly, with the carefree abandon I once took for granted in boyhood.

But by now my aversion to lollygagging was visceral, and so dolce far niente still eluded me. I still worked every morning and afternoon. I also studied Italian, shopped for groceries, walked our dog up into the hills and kicked around a soccer ball with five-year-old granddaughter Lucia.

Still, I’m determined to get the hang of hanging loose. I’m taking my lead from Walt Whitman, our most American of poets, who wrote, “I loafe and invite my soul . . . observing a spear of summer grass.” French philosopher Blaise Pascal likewise advocated going slack. “All of man’s troubles come from his inability to sit alone, quietly, in a room, for any length of time,” he said.

I intend to set aside a few minutes every day to unclutter my mind and daydream and cut my thoughts loose like a kite catching a high wind. I’ll try to take my time before my time gets taken from me. Only if I unplug can I ever really expect to reconnect.

By chance, I know just where to catch a free lesson. Come early evenings here, the old men in town congregate in a courtyard in front of our municipal building.

There, in the generous shade of a looming oak tree, they cluster with clockwork regularity into cliques. Pensioners all, and probably boyhood buddies, too, they pal around, gabbing away in thick local dialect, here and there breaking into laughter and song, until dusk delicately descends. They clearly have nothing much else they have to do, nor, for that matter, much of anything they would rather be doing.

It’s an inspiring spectacle, the art of dolce far niente personified. I’m there nightly, taking a bench to observe it all as if an anthropologist. Maybe, if I really apply myself, I’ll learn someday how to do more or less the same as they.