aerasio

Case 1

Preamble
This essay is really good! Read it! It'll help you with English!

That said it is also rather cheem and at times difficult to understand, but that just comes with the package doesn't it.

Clarifications
Now, as we say in debate, let me deal with some housekeeping issues. Sorry about the last post about a memory card, I'm sorry if any of you took it seriously because I wasn't serious. It was just that I needed one for my laptop (and still do in fact). Sorry if any of you gave it thought and thank you for your kind wishes.

The Real Deal
Now that that is dealt with, I move on to my case substantive.

The scene is in my home in Singapore, four years ago. My parents are out and I’m lazing around on the couch, strumming my guitar. Suddenly, I hear my Father’s car roll through the driveway. I thrust my guitar onto its stand, drop my guitar pick and hastily start doing the homework I should have been doing the moment I got back from school, in short, I look busy. My parents stroll in and see nothing amiss. This is a familiar image. Many of us can identify with it, having done similar things ourselves when we were younger. Many of us would condemn it too, realizing now that such idling is folly, or is it? We live in a society that denounces idling as foolishness and sheer idiocy. Idling is a thing to warn your child against, to shun and to repress. Condemning idleness has become such a knee-jerk reaction that we do it faster than a teenager can send out a text message. However, for all the hate idling gets, is it really so bad? For me, the answer is a simple no.

Society thinks a great many things about idling. “An idle mind is the devil’s workshop” goes the old proverb, “Work is no disgrace: it is idleness which is a disgrace” says Hesiod the Greek poet. However, these vague, cryptic statements tell us little about the act itself. They beg the question, “what is idleness really all about?” For me, idleness is a matter of focus. A man studying Max Weber’s “The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism” for his class tomorrow could hardly be classified as idling, for he has a solid goal in mind. However, a man who stumbles upon a random book while lazing around the house and begins to read it half-heartedly would be idling. Similarly, a teenager who starts chatting to a friend he meets in the street is chatting idly, while a businessman who meets a client and discusses business over lunch is not idle. Idling by this definition then, is not the absence of activity, but the absence of focused and purposeful activity. This does not mean that nothing of value can be achieved while idling. Li Bai, a famed poet of ancient China, wrote his most famous poems while drinking and idling with his friends. Rather, it just means that there is no initial purpose or motive in idling. Idleness is fluid, anarchic and the point of it is that there is no point of it. It does not need one.

Obviously, not all of us, or even many of us, will be a modern day Li Bai. Our result-oriented, consumerist selves immediately ask, “Why in the world should we bother with being idle?” This is because in the words of John Lennon, “Time you've enjoyed wasting is not wasted time at all”. Idle time gives a person’s mind space to stretch out and yawn. It is a time to explore our insignificant curiosities, to indulge our trivial fancies, to amuse and entertain ourselves while taking it easy. It relaxes our rigid work ethics, and unravels the ropes of stress and discipline that bind the giant of creativity. While idle time may not be very productive, it certainly is very therapeutic and is an essential activity for our minds.

Idle time is also not completely unproductive. Just as a computer can lend its processing power to computing the human genome while in hibernation, so can the human mind, while idling, solve that math problem you’ve been wondering about for weeks. Sometimes solutions to our problems wander like whales through the seas of our minds, waiting for the right trigger to erupt into splendid clarity. Idling lets our unconscious mind solve the conscious mind’s problems and gives creativity and imagination the free reign it needs to produce brilliance.

Conclusion
Idling is a wonderful thing. It refreshes and enriches the mind and sometimes even helps us solve problems. That being said, it is not a replacement for hard work. However it is a necessary respite from the rat race of life, a restful exercise that allows us to exercise our creativity with child-like abandon. As a wise sage once said, “take everything in moderation and you shall have everything in abundance.” Like all things, it is bad for us when done excessively. That should not however, cause us to vilify it or ignore its usefulness. It is not a sin or crime anymore than sleeping or vacationing is. Those who don’t idle every so often and let their minds take a break from the daily grind only make it harder on themselves. So idle every once in awhile, it’s good for you.






What do you think?

So said Aerasio at 12:08