The wildness of forced idleness

Plus: A copper mug, a leather jacket, and a pair of aviator sunglasses

It's still Friday here, so I shall slip one more note your way, and then I shall stay silent for another week.

I'm coming across the word “Idlewild” a lot this weekend, and it captures experiences and observations I've been having the past 57 hours. It also happens to be a year ago to the day that I covered the same word in a Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows entry. The collision of these tiny things gave rise to this desire to tap out something I am learning about.

Idlewild.

It's the mind in suspension from the things it's usually able to grasp, decide on, and act upon. It’s the flight without WiFi access, the twelve hours stuck in an airport, the days spent amongst people you’ve never met before (IRL, at least) knowing you probably won’t ever see them in person again without as significant of an excuse as a wedding.

I call it the near-insanity of forced idleness.

Or ‘Idlewild'.

Some of us know a little bit of boredom is good for you. They oil your neurons, give fuel to your creativity, fire to your soul, and place for the heart to breathe. Some would even say an hour or two of nothin-doin' couldn’t hurt you.

But when the periods of time stretch on into hours without definite ending points, or days on end, the mind slips into a weird space. It feels oddly like a localized identity crisis happening within the mind — it’s as if what it thinks or even what it thinks doesn’t matter anymore; because what is is what is, the person thinking can do nothing to change the situation or even its settings, and the body and mind is simply on whatever ride or set-of-nows the person is in.

It’s the same mental state vacationers pay for and jail sentences try to give. It's the state you’re in when you upend your entire life for something amazing, only to have the bottom fall out of your world, leaving you stranded in the middle of Nobody, Nowhere.

If you try and take advantage of this time by actually keeping your mind turned on, you might inadvertently turn it into a semiconscious deep-clean of your psyche (albeit a strangely emotionally detached one for me). You run the risk of gaining piercing clarity on dreams and regrets — and what your next steps would be with them — without the ability to do something about them right now.

If your life is human and realistic, you tend to snap out of this idlewildness once the situation shifts, or when you’re finally able to do something about it.

Or…you choose to snap out of it. You wander slowly in circles through the haze. You play games on your device, take a dip in the hot tub, ignore deeper, important, non-urgent thoughts that beg to be thought, and wonder what other small and inconsequential wins you could aim for in the next hour to feel a little closer to being yourself without all the annoyances of real life.

Maybe that’s the only frame of mind within which I'd head into a gigantic Goodwill and come out looking like this for absolutely no reason:

…

Let me go play Go now. I think I'm starting to love it.

Goodnight!

Odelia