The Importance of being idle

I love to sleep. In fact, it’s my second favourite thing to do, tapping constantly at the heels of my favourite occupation – staying up and drinking. Sleeping is the very pinnacle of being idle. When I say sleeping, it is not the recuperative sleep that one is forced to take after a hard day’s work. I am referring to the nap that I take to recover from the previous nap. What does one do at 11 am on a Saturday morning? Have a drink and go to sleep. Wake up at 1. Have another drink. Go back to sleep. Believe it or not, that is how kings lived in peace time in the golden era of humanity, free from vices such as mundane jobs, soap operas, the internet and blackberry. When I am lying in bed, I often think about what people do in heaven. I bet they just hang out, drink and sleep. They stay idle.
Being idle is the very foundation on which the potential for true greatness rests. Luminaries, who had the greatest brain waves in the history of time, were hit by that bolt from the blue when they were idle. Picture this – Isaac Newton. Lazing around, backed up against an apple tree, sitting on the green grass at Trinity College, gets beaned on the head by an errant apple, discovers gravity, and gets knighted. Now picture this – Isaac Newton. Hard at work, in a lab, gets beaned on the head by an errant chandelier, discovers gravity, but dies within a split second of that. Gets a pre-mature epitaph. No ‘Eureaks’, No ‘Blimeys’, No Knighthood. Just extinction of life and knowledge. That calamity was averted by the fact that Sir Isaac, at the time of his greatest discovery, was sitting idle.
Erik the red landed in Newfoundland in the 11th century. Yet he is not credited with discovering the Americas. Why? Because he picked up everything he discovered, put it in the bunk of his ship, and brought it back home to Scandinavia to be displayed in his guest room or to be impaled on iron gates or to be put up in his harem. He was at work. He was obsessed with his full-time occupation of raping and pillaging. Compare this to Christopher Columbus. He had no full-time occupation. He did not even find what he was looking for. He found something cool anyways. He was under no pressure to rape and pillage. It was not his objective. At least not the stated one. It was all good in the new world till the fun and games lasted, and as we all know, it turned ugly once the Europeans decided to get busy and felt obligated to spread the word of God by crucifying everybody who disagreed with them. What’s with the aggression? Why this Kolaveri di?
Give it a thought. Who has fucked up the world? It’s the guys who work 20 hours a day – the governments, the investment bankers, the nuclear scientists, the religious folk and the likes. Who is trying to save it? People who are into chilling out and have no stated reason to exist – Rastafarians, Technology guys, bloggers and PETA. Aggressive behaviour is gaining acceptability just the way Nazism gained acceptability in Krautland back in the day. We all know how that ended. People say life is short. That is a damned lie. Life isn’t short, the weekend is short. The other five days are long as hell. The spring is short. The winter is longer than all Merchant-Ivory movies taken together. Bliss is short. Heartbreaks linger. It is important to have a dream. It is important to chase it while it still means something. However, can the pursuit of social acceptance really be called a dream worth dreaming? If our values are like our genes, are they really values? The business of being busy has been designed to crush young spirits. Institutions, all of them, have become assembly lines of mediocrity and conformism. I look at my immediate circle, and I find spirits, once free, now crumbling under the burden of degrees, designations and delusions. We get addicted to money, and then there is no going back. You can go back from cocaine, but not from money.
I wish that the generations that follow, have better conviction than ours had. I wish they are told the true meaning of freedom and of responsibility. Of honesty and of value. I wish they are allowed to have their own dreams. I wish that when they grow up, they still feel like becoming what they wanted to become when they were seven years old. I wish they are not scared of soaring high and shining. I wish they are not scared of crashing and burning in the pursuit of those heights. I wish they can be idle or busy, as and when they want to. I wish they have role models worth having. I wish some of us become those role models. I wish they can be abrupt a hundred times, in pursuit of completeness. I wish they understand the importance of being idle.