Loafing is the most popular lesson of my 20-year teaching career. I got the idea from Walt Whitman, who writes in “Song of Myself”:
I loafe and invite my soul,
I lean and loafe at my ease observing a spear of summer grass.
This made me think students might enjoy loafing — especially when I realized that they didn’t know what loafing means.
So one day we learned by doing. I took my English class at Grand Arts High School in downtown out to a vast lawn on campus perfect for loafing, which I told the teens meant doing anything they enjoyed so long as it was low-key. They loved having the freedom to sit or lie on the grass, looking up at the sky or down at bugs and tiny flowers, having heartfelt conversations, freeing their minds. For the rest of the school year, students asked if we could go loafing again.
My answer was yes. We loafed by flying kites, blowing bubbles, tossing seed balls. The academic justification was twofold: (1) learning the habit of mind of being open to the sheer pleasure of being alive; and (2) writing about it, zestfully.
Now that I’m retired from teaching, I think about loafing even more, especially about doing nothing as an antidote for loneliness. When I first started working on this guide, I would go to parks to loaf alone, and that would be great except that it got to be a lot of me sitting in a park by myself.
So then I started inviting friends to do nothing with me. These invitations took loafing to a new level. Inviting people to do nothing is a winning invitation. They don’t have to share your taste in anything, and they also don’t have to give up their day because how long does it take to do nothing?
Eleven minutes. That’s for the classic: getting outdoors and noticing your surroundings while not talking or taking pictures or looking stuff up on your phone. Do nothing for 11 minutes with an old or new pal, then take turns sharing what you noticed.
You could just do 10 minutes or even one minute, but I like 11 minutes because it’s a little bit beyond. The important thing is not how long you do nothing. The important thing is the connection that comes from sharing the experience. This will lead to deep and enriching conversations, the kind you had in your favorite high school English class.
Speaking of books: In his eminently practical meditation guide “How to Sit,” Thich Nhat Hanh had this to say about location: “Anywhere is fine.”
While being mindful of that, I want to share with you the best parks I’ve come across in L.A. County for loafing, a.k.a. chilling or doing nothing. These parks are especially fine because they feel safe and give you good choices of where to sit. I personally like sprawling out on top of a picnic table so that a ray of sun can land in the middle of my forehead and spark a third eye. But that’s just me. There are a million different ways to do nothing, and all of them are good.