The weekend is upon us and it’s time to get…idle. Idling is not the same as being lazy. It’s about contemplating life and enjoying the simple things it offers which often are the best. There’s something to be said about that when it comes to embracing a green lifestyle.
Many of the contemporary ideas and sentiments related to work and productivity come from the Victorian age, that highly-polluting, greedy period of men in top hats lording over sooty factory workers doing 15-hour work stints, while the chimneys of England and then the rest of the Western world threw up the dirty smoke that marked the beginning of the human-caused process of global warming.
We may have advanced in terms of worker’s rights, but we are still very attached to those ideas of labour and how time should be spent. Remember Margaret Thatcher? She was a product of this Victorian mentality that shaped the cultural environment of the 1980s.
For those interested in digging more into this subject, I would recommend Tom Hodgkinson’s book How To Be Free, a guide to the good life with an emphasis, among other things, on an ecologically balanced way of living and being. It was published by Idler books, the people behind the magazine called, you guessed it, The Idler, something of a cult phenomenon in England.
Hodgkinson’s lists a few things that you can do to become a proper idler. It’s all done with great sense of humour and wit, but there’s a ring of truth in the simple things he mentions that underline some important issues related to the quality of our lives and the health of our planet.
Have a great, idle weekend!
