Last month, I read an op-ed in the New York Times about how important it is to do nothing. I set it aside and when I went back to find it, I saw the same topic broached four or five times. All of these writers were advertising for the lost art of stillness, inertia, or as I put it glorious indolence; getting into a hammock and staring into space, making yourself a snack and lying back into the same bed you just got out of. I would add binge-watching TV shows on Netflix, but even that is potentially too much of a something. What we’re really looking for here is a big, blank stretch of time you might only fill with some drawings, ideas and a good book.

The whole concept reminds me of all those hours I spent staring at the sky as a kid. Time seemed infinite in those days and the world only seemed to exist for the purpose of mystery and discovery. Life was one long meditation, from morning to night. And it was mine, too, with all its discoveries, wonders, and possibilities. Even as some kid lying supine in the grass staring at airplanes, I had some command of myself and my environment. I was free to explore it.

Then I went to school. They meant well; they did. But it was my first institution, and I remember it had a nasty habit of flattening the three-dimensional world into textbooks. We had to learn to spell the world and calculate it. A teacher told us what the world was, and graded us on how well we picked it up. There were other requirements: we had to have the right friends and the teacher had to like us. The lights, I remember, were horribly fluorescent, which illuminated the classroom like a display case. We were ranked. And the world outside, in all its possibilities, in all its vast wonder, became a snapshot through a glass. A fence corralled us at recess and I used to watch the garbage men just outside of the fence. They wore jumpsuits and worked the truck, turning the dumpsters over, and I thought, enviously: “they’re free.”

Later, college and the workplace were both replicas of the first. By then, we were supposed to be used to the ranking business. Learning stopped being passionate and joyous, but rather something we do for approval. And we go to work for the honor in it, learn to call Wednesday hump day and say TGIF, and that sort of thing. In the Midwest, they say, “workin’ hard or hardly workin’,” and sometimes people laugh as if they’ve never heard that one.