Loafing is not laziness

Most people think loafing means doing nothing: a day on the sofa, something half-watched on television, nowhere in particular to be.

We build weeks around 5am starts, long days out and cols in the rain. You get home just in time for Monday, exhausted.

Isn't Loafing the exact opposite of what we do?

Then we came across Walt Whitman.

“I loafe and invite my soul”

Whitman’s Song of Myself begins:

I celebrate myself, and sing myself,

And what I assume you shall assume,

For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.

I loafe and invite my soul,

I lean and loafe at my ease observing a spear of summer grass.

Whitman’s loafing isn’t laziness. He isn’t recovering from work or waiting for something to happen. He is paying attention.

He temporarily puts “creeds and schools” to one side. He stops taking life second-hand through teachers, books and other people’s ideas. He lies in the grass and experiences the world directly: body, soul, air, earth, breath and sensation all at once.

Loafing is how he becomes present.

It is time outside work, obligation and utility. Time which does not have to produce anything. Time which belongs entirely to the person spending it.

And then something interesting happens: Whitman gets up.

Loafing doesn’t mean standing still

Song of Myself does not remain on the grass. It expands into an enormous, physical journey through workers, swimmers, sailors, lovers, animals, cities, mountains, birth, suffering and death.

Whitman wanders through wild country “amazed at my own lightness and glee.” He declares himself “enamour’d of growing out-doors.” He swims, sweats, walks, works and travels.

At one point he writes:

I tramp a perpetual journey.

Then:

Not I, not any one else can travel that road for you,

You must travel it for yourself.

And, rather wonderfully for us:

I am the teacher of athletes.

The poem is full of effort. But none of it is performed for a boss, a medal, a faster time or a more productive self. It is driven by appetite, curiosity and the pleasure of being alive.

Whitman’s loafing is not an activity. It is an attitude.

Light-hearted, not lightweight

That attitude runs through another Whitman poem, Song of the Open Road:

Afoot and light-hearted I take to the open road,

Healthy, free, the world before me,

The long brown path before me leading wherever I choose.

There is a particular kind of ease in those lines. Not the ease of avoiding difficulty, but the ease of choosing it.

Whitman does not promise comfort:

I do not offer the old smooth prizes, but offer rough new prizes.

He describes the earth as rude and difficult to understand. He calls for good blood, courage and endurance. He writes of “tramps of days, rests of nights.” Yet the road is taken light-heartedly, in good spirits, with other people.

Allons! whoever you are come travel with me!

The challenge and the joy are not in conflict. The challenge is part of the joy.

Leisure is not laziness

That was the distinction we had been missing.

We tend to define leisure by how little effort it involves. Whitman defines it by who the time belongs to.

Work is effort required of you. Loafing is effort freely chosen.

That means loafing can be lying in the grass. It can also be getting out of bed in the dark, pulling on wet kit and climbing into bad weather with people who decided this would be a good way to spend a Saturday.

Nobody made you do it. It does not need to make you richer, faster or more impressive. The experience is not a means to some more useful end.

The experience is the point.

Our kind of loafing

Loaf exists to make difficult things possible for people who actively want them.

An athlete chooses a route they care about. A small team chooses to join them. We handle the applications, preparation, logistics and safety. Then everyone goes and does the difficult part together.

Not because they have to. Because they would rather spend their freedom doing something demanding, memorable and alive.

We don’t define loafing by how little you do. We define it by why you’re doing it.

Loafing is not the absence of effort. It’s the absence of obligation.

It is a 5am start. A col in the rain. Getting to Monday exhausted.

Doing something for no reason other than the joy of it.