Doing Nothing
Part II: New wisdoms
Moderately spice your doing nothing with
some color movement on your retina, some joy and some irritation

Three years ago, just emigrated from The Netherlands, I wrote about the subject of "Doing Nothing" for the first time (Doing Nothing, Part I). My views on the matter have changed, not to say ripened. Last week, after writing my page about Thucydides, I tried Juvenalis and Persius, Roman poets (1st Century AD), with the reputation of being satirists. But the guys are profoundly boring. In as far as they do mock people and habits, they only target people already dead at time of publishing, preferably ones whose reputation had been lost anyway, so they did not have to fear danger. Then, to say the least, they made sure their jokes do not betray their intelligence. Hence I set out to find some other way to waste considerable time: to bring my golf to serious scientific standards.
I measured my clubs, measured the distances of their shots, compared that to good clubs I borrowed, and to official factory measures on the internet. I discovered profound systematic irregularities both in hit distances and in measurements, but failed to find any connection between the two. Thus, two days passed quite agreeably and, fortunately! , without any conclusions. I decided I will buy myself a good set of irons, trusting the factory engineers for proper sizing and shaping, and play with them in an old golf bag so as not to be laughable for scoring badly as I do with a class set of clubs.
 

Let's set this straight: if doing nothing, as with me, is beyond your reach, you should do as little as is still agreeable: you very moderately spice your doing nothing with some color movement on your retina, some joy and some irritation. Watching TV comes close but is disagreeable because programmers constantly create unrest by trying to mobilize your support for this or that, or try to aggressively sell the worst of crap. A better alternative is the typical daytime passing of most staff of my former employer, Tilburg University (writing papers about nothing and meet for lengthy discussions about them with a good coffee). But one of the best alternative options in this respect is indeed the treading over green fairways bordered with trees, every now and then hitting a ball, followed, according to the result, with either joy or some profound swearing. The rest of the day, to stiffen my golf confidence, I now read about Alexander the Great, who played the 18 thousand holes of Egypt and Persia until India, accompanied by a hundred thousand caddies, lawnmowers, green-makers, put-diggers and flag planters. Another beneficial effect of this reading is that the astonishing actions possible for Alexander make you feel an additional comfort in not having to do the same. This I learned from Hans Burgman, missionary in Kenya, who once told me that Europeans have greatly contributed to the well-being of the Africans by enormously adding to the list of what Africans feel very happy to avoid doing. The reading of Alexander's relentless action is of course alternated with gazes around the Nile source bay, especially when living creatures make themselves seen and heard. Those are dealt with on the page Nile Source Life (birds, fish, insects, reptiles), to which I just added the daily visits, the first three hours after sunset, by zillions of lake flies of many sizes, nicely held outdoors by the net wire on our hatches, who come to mate and die.

Photo: our morning harvest of lake flies on the steering deck

and a visit by a young 40 cm monitor lizard (varanus) exploring the hollow parts of our boards for a sleeping nest. Adults of the lake variant can grow up to 2 m. When an adult passes you in the lake, as one did a few weeks ago, it looks bigger than a crocodile because it keeps its entire head above the water.

Photo: A baby monitor lizard (varanus), adults can grow over 2 m.

and last but not least an inflatable canoe with multicultural crew, in for a soda and a swim at our dhow,

Photo: a swimming gang around our dhow

Thus the intensity of events is tuned nicely below any disturbing level, as near as comfortable to zero. Then you wait - this can take days, even weeks - until that fine moment you miraculously feel a lust rising in yourself. The uncontrollable lust to do something. You may suddenly find yourself shaping 24 wooden clamps to improve the tie of your deck tarpaulin, sticking your quanting poles under the tent and lifting them to let shade fall under the wind pass through, lowering your cabin temperature with 4 degrees.

Or, you sit in the shade of the Kingfisher Safari Lodge trees to cut a pattern with a sophisticated waist in one the refugee tents flooding the African markets, for your motor cycle and bring it to the seamstress.

Photo: Note, in the UNHCR logo, the little cross-motorcycle under those protecting hands!

Then, when it starts to rain, lie on your bed and dream of being your motorcycle.