The virtues of idleness
Lazy. Slothful. Nonproductive. These are just a few descriptors any good natured man aims to earn. Idle hands are the devil’s playthings, but God only cursed us with labor for having learned the difference between good and evil despite his prohibition. Been moving around at the speed of light for so long it just feels nice to be lazing about.
This is a lie
I can’t laze about. I’m a busybody. I haven’t been doing much writing but I’ve been doing plenty of hacking, playing mandolin, studying Vietnamese (and now Mandarin) and I kinda got hooked on a new video game. I’ve been pounding through my Netflix queue. Like I’m not traveling at all, like I’m not in one of the craziest, busiest cities I’ve ever visited. Or like I am, but living an unemployed life at home, like I was for several months before this journey.
It’s a good break from the style of travel we were engaged in in Malaysia and Thailand, and even to an extent in Japan, outside of our time at the farm in Japan and the bakery in Thailand. It’s like we get all the benefits of not being in the USA, mixed with all the benefits of having a home.
Ninh Binh
A great contrast to the big crazy cities of Vietnam are the tiny countrysides. They’re quiet. People use bicycles more often than they use motorbikes or cars. Days are slow. Mountains rise in the distance, lakes and rivers divide the rice fields. The water buffalo putz about in a manner such that I look productive.
And then of course you get to one of those mountains, one of those lakes, and it’s clogged full of tourists trying to get that grammable pic. But it’s okay: you took an hour long bike ride through the countryside to get there and you don’t really feel stressed out by these pothered travelers, you don’t even really understand what the madness is about. It’s so nice here, why are their minds a million unpleasant miles away?
The rain takes over in the evening, and after a pleasant meal under a grass-thatched roof, sharing a few beers with others, you enjoy a book listening to the water’s rhythm.
My favorite thing to do was nothing
I have so many distractions available to me. I didn’t mean to bring my Nintendo Switch but on a whim, I packed it. “It’s not that heavy,” I assured myself. “It’ll be good for the flights.” Then there’s the computer on which I’m typing this. I justified that, by you: what will my dedicated readers think if I stop writing about my travels, about the movies I’m watching?! And let’s not forget the world’s greatest distraction device, the cellphone telephone. Yes it’s a wonderful tool by which I’m studying languages, keeping my family’s worries down, and navigating these new places with ease, but I’m also looking at a lot of those instagram photos people keep standing in long lines to take on the mountains I’m trying to hike. Well, not really. I’m more of a meme guy, tbh, as much as my boring, plain-text, sadboi blog may suggest otherwise. But all these things keep me quite occupied.
When I last went backpacking, traveling through South and Central America, I had no computer, no video games, and I destroyed my phone about two weeks into my four month journey, never replacing it. When I returned from my trip and got an apartment of my own, living on my own for the first time, I spent most of my time doing nothing. Just sitting and thinking. Sitting and napping. Maybe I’d put on some music or read a book, but it was often too hard to focus on the melodies or prose with all the nothing to attend to. Nothingness is a habit of sorts. You have to make a habit of idleness. Of unfocused unproductivity. I’m worried I’m not using this time to properly deprogram myself from the busyness. The business. The being-ness.
By jove, if I ditched the computer and Nintendo Switch, my mandolin would be my only carry on. That would be pretty nice. Tax season is almost over, which was the only thing I needed my computer for. I may have to put off defeating the Zenoiran Empire for a while if I part ways with the Switch. Or would I even go back to it at all if I embraced nothingness again?
