The Calvinistic work ethic that so many of us Protestants seemed to have inherited from God knows where [and I hope God knows why!] makes us suspect of people who would engage – or even think about it – in trivial pursuits or idle conversations. According to this inbred doctrine, we must spend our lives in an orderly pursuit of worthwhile goals. We should always work like the devil to produce results that are clearly measurable and have some utilitarian purpose.
In my collegiate years, Florence Nightingale pinpointed this notion and grabbed my work-ethic imagination with a quote that hung on my dorm wall: Live your life while you have it. Life is a splendid gift. There is nothing small in it. For the greatest things grow by God’s Law out of the smallest. But to live your life you must discipline it. You must not fritter it away in “fair purpose, erring act, inconstant will” but make your thoughts, your acts, all work to the same end and that end, not self but God. That is what we call character.
While those words might have kept my shoulder to the wheel, nose to the grindstone, and midnight oil burning in that old dorm room, it’s beginning to occur to me in the latter phases of my years, that there just might be some merit in whiling away time in things that seem insignificant and spending more energy on less energetic endeavors. Of course, that’s easier said than done. Given our modus operandi, we’d have to be sure everything else was done before we could really enjoy such slack occasions.
When you read the accounts of Jesus in the gospels, there is an apparent easy-going and laid-back manner that he uses to disarm people while disturbing their spirits. There is a certain degree in which the rabbi sees a larger truth in what others might call trite: a latent mustard seed full of possibilities; salt that’s worth more than its salt. A pearl worth more than life itself. Birds of the air. Lilies of the field that toil not nor spin but which outdo Solomon in all his accomplishments. Who in the world has time to be provoked by such trivial things? It’s like stumbling over stardust.
E.B. White once quipped that when got up every morning, he was “torn between a desire to improve the world and a desire to enjoy the world. This makes it hard to plan the day.”
Maybe one of the best gospels we can hear is that it’s OK to pursue the insignificant delights and enjoy idle chatter about nothing in particular. To stop and smell the roses and feast upon the stars. I don’t mean to become lackadaisical or languid or lazy; nor do I intend that we approach everything with nonchalance or complacency.
Every splendid inch of living is a gift outright – neither earned nor created by the likes of us – and a passion for this beautiful life requires a quiet enjoyment of simple pleasures and easy-going pastimes. Maybe we should work on that more!