Doing nothing

NOTE: I'm writing this on June 1, but I'm posting it on May 1, just after the West Highland Way narratives. These are some notes that I originally jotted during one of the long delays in my travel as described here.

In my post about flying to Scotland, at one point I talk about getting to the airport and "do[ing] Airport things." What are "Airport things?" What is the experience of air travel?

It's a kind of Never-Never-Land. All your regular duties and tasks are suspended, and there is very little within your control. You are allowed—indeed required—to be largely passive. You can shop. You can eat. But other than that you go where you are supposed to go and do what you are told to do. On the plane it is the same but even more so: there are almost no opportunities for initiative other than selecting a beverage or deciding to go to the lavatory. And so, for all the hubbub and busy-ness and noise, air travel is in a way a surprisingly blank and empty experience. Everyone is a stranger. You will pretty reliably never see any of these people again. There is nothing you can get done, and nothing you are expected to get done. It lifts you right out of ordinary life.

I remember back in 1994, traveling for work with my boss and realizing he had brought his laptop so he could work on the plane. It disturbed me to think of work encroaching on this empty space, this mini-vacation, even though I was in fact traveling for work! In later years of course I brought my laptop along too. But I was often not very productive during the travel itself. There were always good reasons, of course: no Internet connection while on the plane, not enough time to get into something while waiting at the gate, no adequate table space to lay out my papers. But behind it all, I didn't want that time disturbed. Even if work were paying for the travel (and might therefore have a legitimate claim on my time), I treated it as a vacation—in the very literal sense that it was a span of time which I had vacated (or emptied) of all meaningful content, a time when I could just drift.

Come to think of it, this is how I spend a lot of my free time, too. I may look for distractions to while the time away. But the main appeal is precisely that of doing nothing, even though when I actually do something I often enjoy it. And so it is often a relief when any particular "something" ends and I can resume doing nothing. Yes, sometimes it gets dull. But often that's OK.

For a fuller picture, compare this post with this one, that I wrote a week ago (but posted in real time).