There's nothing quite like it

I took a short break from writing to enjoy what turned out to be an impromptu holiday-in-place. The word vacation has its roots in the Latin vacare, to be empty and unoccupied. As the holiday season started, I felt no need to vacate my home, to feel empty by leaving and filling another place with my ‘unoccupied’ self.

In my previous letter a couple of weeks ago, I wrote about the importance of a short period of languid sponging off ourselves, embracing what I called the little death or the emptiness that dominates the height of Summer. The exercise remains mildly distressing, especially when (unsubstantiated) thoughts on the bottomless nature of indolence visit me. Don’t get too lazy now, or you’ll never crawl back up to do something worthwhile. But I know new ideas often arise out of boredom.

During my holiday-in-place, I became enraptured by simple things, such as listening to trees rustle in the wind in front of my home and following the dappled play of shadows on the bracken. Several times, I fell through the slight unease of my languor into a mystical experience of the ordinary. My mind rewarded me for my gentle perseverance, boredom being the gatekeeper that only let me pass through once I pledged my allegiance. Beyond its gate, I explored the realm inhabited by my inner muse, whispering to me in my daydreams.

I am inclined to resist boredom with distractions that provide an easy way out of the unsettling effects of doing nothing. As a result, I have spent entire summers busying myself with people and parties without momentarily stepping away from my socialite self. But the whispers are soft and easily drown out in the discordance. When I do not carve out some empty space, the inner voice remains dormant, quietly waiting for me to listen.

In the summer months, we tend to reject our ordinary life, searching for the sometimes beguiling voice of an extraneous muse. This muse often appears in the shape of a person we desire but can also present itself as something we do not possess and are convinced will change us. We either go along with its giddy pull or resist, sitting quietly in the centre of the storm.

A recurring preference among artists, thinkers, and writers is to retreat to a quiet place in summer. They discovered that a deliberate break with the outside world is needed to engross oneself in the creative process. We can deliberately choose to be bored, to immure ourselves in a quiet place, and sit with that thing we tell ourselves we never have the time for. We disappear, resisting our favoured gratifications, and commit to something intrinsically hard and uneasy.

There is nothing quite like it.