I’ve had a dozen or more blogs over the last several years — a few that were my primary blog, and then dozens of specialty blogs. One of my specialty blogs was called Send in the Clouds, and it looked a little something like this:

I noticed that I took a lot of cloud pictures so I put them there, so I could scroll through and see the best of them at a glance. The last post I made there was in October 2006, but that wasn’t the last cloud photo I took. I remembered this blog after reading this article in the NYTimes (A Guide to Entice Heads into the Clouds); I encourage you to read it, because it’s really not just about clouds. It’s really about the importance of paying attention, of being idle, and of being present. If you really get into it, you might join The Cloud Appreciation Society, as I have. You can buy cloud posters, art, books, t-shirts, and even music (well, the CD is rain, but you can’t get rain without clouds).

The man who is the focus of the NYTimes article has a website called The Idler, which I also heartily recommend. His archives have such great categories as Crap Jobs, Practical Idling, and Notes From the Couch (probably not about psychoanalysis!).

I halfway think that people in Europe (the UK especially, perhaps?) have a greater appreciation for the benefits of idling, compared to people in the US. Not that plenty of us here aren’t idlers, it’s just quickly seen as a Very Bad Thing, not being busy busy busy all the time. We try to one-up each other with just how busy we are, just how busy our kids are, just how packed our week is, how many years it’s been since we took a vacation. CRAZY. When I first found The Idler, I thought of that great line from Wind in the Willows:  “There’s nothing . . . absolutely nothing . . . half so much worth doing as simply messing around in boats.” (A British author, no surprise!)

I think I’ll block out some time in my calendar for idling: let’s see, I have an opening in two weeks, from 2:30 to 2:45.