Just sitting around doing nothing isn’t really my thing. On the contrary, I’m more of a multitasker than someone who practises mindfulness: I watch a film whilst replying to messages at the same time. I edit photos and listen to podcasts, and it’s not uncommon for me to fall asleep whilst a stream is playing. I know that’s not really good for me, but I need my iPhone to pass the time whilst I’m waiting.
However, the recent heatwave literally forced me out into our shady, green garden. 38 degrees in the attic study is simply too much; I’d much rather be offline in the green haven by the garden pond. My first impulse was to reach for my iPhone; my second, to just leave it behind. What followed was actually nothing out of the ordinary. Just light filtering through the leaves, indistinct animal sounds in the hedge, a distant car – and silence. And somewhere in between, my impatience and restlessness, which were only very slowly fading away, even though the heat was certainly helping.
Why do we actually find it so hard to tolerate silence and doing nothing? Why, as soon as we have a spare second, do we immediately start filling it up again? A podcast on the way to work, music whilst out for a walk, a quick glance at our mobile whilst eating. Automatic behaviours that kick in as soon as a gap appears. Because boredom looms. Because silence makes us nervous and stillness makes us fidgety. Few words have a worse reputation than ‘boredom’. Boredom is seen as empty, wasted time; as a sign that nothing interesting or important is happening at the moment. And as something that must be dispelled as quickly as possible.
Perhaps Marcel Proust would have laughed at this. His entire work, *In Search of Lost Time*, is based on the conviction that true experience lies not in major events, but in the spaces in between. More than three thousand pages devoted to sleepless nights or afternoons with no plans. Moments of idleness, in which, by today’s standards, hardly anything ‘happens’. Instead, Proust focuses on those moments when the mind – finally unoccupied – suddenly becomes receptive to a taste, a smell, a light – and in them rediscovers the memory of a seemingly lost time. For Proust, memory and inspiration do not arise on command. They emerge above all during the pauses that we today fill almost reflexively. In doing so, we all too quickly forget that one cannot simply scroll one’s way to an insight. One must allow it a free moment so that it can emerge.
The Romans called this free moment of leisure ‘otium’. This stood in contrast to the time devoted to earning a living, the ‘negotium’. Otium was not a deprivation, but a cultural achievement: the prerequisite for philosophy, for poetry, for thoughts that cannot be forced. It was not until much later that free time became a source of suspicion – something that must be justified because it serves no apparent purpose. Leisure is therefore not empty time, but the only time that truly belongs to us – because it serves no one else. However, the situation today is different from that in ancient Rome. Back then, one had to be able to afford otium – time not devoted to work was a privilege. We do not lack time, but rather the ability to endure it. The gap is there. We simply close it before it can even make itself felt. This is no coincidence, but a calculated move. Hardly any app or feed is designed in such a way that breaks are allowed to occur. On the contrary: every second without stimulation is regarded as a wasted second, as an opportunity that should have been put to better use. You have to actively defend your own restlessness in order to allow yourself to feel it. Perhaps that is precisely the true art of boredom today – not idleness in itself, but resistance to the constant invitation to give it up.
And this is precisely what distinguishes leisure from the distraction with which we usually confuse it today. Distraction fills the void. Leisure leaves it open – and it is precisely this openness in which something reveals itself that cannot be ordered. Boredom, then, is not spectacular. It produces neither headlines nor souvenir photos. It cannot be measured and is difficult to describe. But that is precisely why it opens up a space that we have almost lost. A space in which our thoughts are allowed to surface and flow without being judged straight away. We should therefore not view those few free, unplanned moments as a shortcoming, but as an invitation. Not every pause needs to be filled. We simply need to learn to endure them once more.
Not always seeking the grand spectacle, but also enjoying fleeting and small moments as breathing space and preserving them as memories in the Proustian sense. And perhaps that is precisely why poetic perfumes move us. Not because they celebrate the grand entrance, but because – like Proust’s famous biscuit – they can provide the spark for something greater. A memory. A mood. A thought that seemed long forgotten. Provided, that is, we take the time to notice it.
