The Virtual Rambler

Number ten: 22^nd November 2010

Dawdling

Having sampled brief bouts of full-time work during summer holidays , I concluded that a leisurely student life was in order for as long as humanly possible. Just reading through a Situations Vacant column brought me out in a cold sweat. Who were all these people who “will be highly focussed , adaptable to change and able to thrive in a deadline-driven environment” ? From penalty-takers to chess masters , focus always earns a ripple of applause denied to those with scattered attention spans. For the single-minded , the pilgrim , the obstreperous and the drunk , there's no discouragement shall make them once relent. The man without a goal , on the other hand , is destined to a random sequence of totally whatever situations. For those adrift on a sea of skrimshanking⁽¹⁾ , no flow of admonitory faxes from head office can galvanise them into increased productivity. In search of an unpressured existence , the last thing we want is to be awakening the giant within. When I survey my elderly contemporaries I hear a chorus of grouchiness and bafflement about the way that things seem to go from bad to worse. Tempting though that response is , we dawdlers have come to prefer a graceful retreat before the tide of the times. Rather like old King Canute.

There are those who tarry and there are others who become exasperated with a dawdling companion. Everything hurries them onwards. The foot-draggers have discovered that in the realm of the fleeting , a dawdler is king of all he surveys. During my afternnon snooze I close my eyes and essay an imaginative depiction of the unhurried pace of life in the Precambrian⁽²⁾oceans. Consortia of minute cells and filaments slowly coming together under protective coatings of slime to the accompaniment of nothing more than gentle waves breaking upon otherwise uninhabited shores. This sort of loitering went on for billenia , before the frenzied evolutionary tempo of the Cambrian epoch brought locomotion to organic life in the form of go-getting predators. Ahhh , the soothing perspectives of geological durations with their imperceptible shuffles of structural change. What a contrast to the febrile and frenetic tempo of modern life , exemplified in the figure of a fell-runner coming down a mountain at full speed , who would fall over if he tried to stop and stays on his feet only by accelerating ever onwards.

The ticking time during which we accomplish tasks and meet appointments may be described as well-spent or otherwise but contrary to the maxim of entrepeneurs , time is NOT money and is entirely indifferent to exchange values. We experience time in itself , as opposed to clock time , only when it isn’t calibrated to our will. Consider those who must linger in duration : the sick and the old , the purposeless , who wait upon time rather than disposing of it. The transience of all things becomes accessible to those for whom the current of time has slowed down to a sloth’s pace. All is subject to change and lives by perishing. Better to spend as much of your allotted span in as leisurely a fashion as you can , unperturbed by the frenzied babble of the mass media or the chuntering rumble of political debate. As uninvolved in any sort of social media as you are inattentive to all marketing claims on your attention. Captains of industry will castigate this as a childish , economically inactive and unrealistic program. Yes indeed. To the committed dawdler their “real world” is a chimera , like the patterns you see floating before you when you rub your eyes on waking from a nap. We who spend our time aimlessly strolling or recumbent in idle reveries prefer the ambience of a play-group to that of the production line. We treasure any opportunity to step off the fast-food chain of instant messaging and instant gratification , thereby to loiter in time rather than be hurried on by spurious deadlines. When we say that time passes , it's we who are passing.

Wig.

⁽¹⁾ a word of unknown origin , it was British military slang for shirking work or one’s obligations. It was one of several words favoured by my mother which are unknown to a modern dictionary. Folk were spragged when thwarted. Small-time entities (like corner shops) were described as penking. Food without substance had no bant in it. To be powfagged was to sulk after being spragged.

⁽²⁾ The fossil record from before about 580 million years ago suggests that organisms were comparatively simple , being composed of individual cells occasionally organized into colonies. The rate of evolution in the Precambrian was very slow, with many species persisting unchanged for billions of years.

The Virtual Rambler

Number ten: 22nd November 2010

Dawdling

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Number ten: 22^nd November 2010