This was published 7 years ago
Holiday planning: Why you should stop trying to see everything
Taking time out in a cafe on your travels can allow you to soak up the essence of a destination.Credit: Michela Ravasio
Next time you travel, throw away your guidebook and abandon your bucket list, because you just might be better off doing nothing at all, suggests Brian Johnston.
When you're next in Rome, please don't bother with St Peter's Basilica. You'll have to queue for an hour to get in, and frankly it's a disturbing place, cluttered with depictions of disembowelled saints, the loot of centuries and waxen-nosed popes in embroidered slippers, lying for all eternity behind glass as the curious shuffle by. A week later, you won't remember much about the basilica, except for its astonishing crowds of Chinese tourists, who are surely bemused by Christendom's great monument to baroque bums and gilt excess. A month later, and your visit will be reduced to a vague impression of ornate tombs and marble floors vast as ice rinks.
I can't recall much about St Peter's myself but I remember a few things about Rome. I remember sitting under a cafe awning as unexpected evening rain cascaded down in Campo de'Fiori, the square's cobbles slick with reflected neon and dark scurrying figures straight from a Fellini movie. I remember sitting in a church pew as time ticked by, wax melted and whispering women came and went, their muted prayers susurrating around the walls. And I remember sitting in a bar drinking Chianti that glowed like fine ruby, and being intoxicated by the long, golden evening in glorious Piazza Navona. In Rome, my day was structured not by guidebooks but by drinks orders and whims.
There used to be a time when I travelled to do things; most of all to see things. Travel was about packing in every possible sight. I mocked package tourists and their "If it's Wednesday, it must be Rome" itineraries, but now I acknowledge my rushed backpacking was scarcely different. I ran around Greek ruins, took in every temple from Bali to Beijing, and ticked off cathedrals as though doing so would get me through the pearly gates of my particular travel religion. In subsequent decades, little changed but for the quality of my accommodation.
Now things have changed. Admittedly, I still fret about bucket lists and whether I've done the top 10 countries, cities and castles so regularly touted on the internet. Yet increasingly, I wonder if anyone will ever actually explain how ticking off the must-sees of tourism is better than doing nothing at all. "It is not enough to be busy. So are the ants," writes Henry David Thoreau. "The question is: What are we busy about?"
Yes, I've seen a great slice of the world, but what am I seeing it for? Why do I feel this pressure to visit and admire things just for their own sake, even when often they leave me indifferent? Truth is, there are only so many palaces and churches one can visit in a lifetime, and yet another one isn't going to energise me. And I think it's about time to come out of the closet and admit that most museums are an insufferable shuffle that makes me want to take to fresh air and strong mojitos. All these years, I think I've been going to museums not because I enjoy them, but rather just to know I've been there and seen the paintings I'm supposed to see.
Increasingly, this sort of hectic, list-ticking travel is becoming rather faded of charm and my attention is wandering. My travelling ways are having a middle-aged crisis. I'm not finding a cure in bimbos, bungy-jumping and bars, however. Just the opposite: I just find myself slowing down. Not, I prefer to believe, through a decrease in energy, but rather through an increase in wisdom. So let me confess that I spend a lot of time on my travels doing absolutely nothing at all. I while away whole afternoons by a riverside, an hour reading a newspaper in a cafe while secretly stickybeaking on other customers. I slouch on park benches and sit below monuments, not looking at the must-see at my back but at the endless flow of passing people in front. Few things are more entertaining than a passing crowd.
This doing nothing, I like to think, allows me to soak up the essence of a destination. If the pauses between musical notes are crucial to the structure and meaning of a symphony, so the downtime when I travel provides context and depth to mere monuments. An hour in a cafe tells me more about Paris than Monet's waterlilies. I could enthuse about dead Napoleon or Marie Antoinette, or turn my attention to living French people. Certainly, there's some "chill and arid knowledge" I can acquire by dutiful sightseeing, yet all around me, when I turn my attention that way, are the "warm and palpitating facts of life".
The words are Robert Louis Stevenson's, from an 1877 essay called An Apology for Idlers that the Scottish writer penned for Cornhill Magazine. I make myself feel better about wasting my time by reminding myself of the famous intellects who promulgated idleness, all the way from the ancient Greek philosophers to Beat Generation writers, who embraced the idea of escaping from the tyranny of our time-constrained lives through random wandering and "meditating on the ways of Destiny". Fired by their words, I just mosey along, dawdle and dillydally, loiter and loaf.
The French call this time-wasting flanerie, and naturally have a whole philosophy on how to be a stylish urban flaneur. But going to Paris or Peru and doing nothing doesn't come easy. It takes a certain courage to ignore famous monuments and must-see museums. I control my panic and remind myself that I don't need queues, crowds and another gold star in my been-there book. Meanwhile the skill of idleness, of childlike staring at the clouds, has to be relearned. After all, we've been taught since forever about the value and rewards of being productive, ambitious and busy. Those with a Protestant background in particular have learned that idleness is next to godlessness. And in the modern social-media world, many of us have lost the ability to be reflective and introspective. Few of us can sit and think of nothing for long.
If you do nothing on your travels, however, you're arguably returning to the original roots of modern holidaying. Up until a century or so ago, life for the individual wasn't divided into the work-leisure separation that guides us today. The working classes toiled nearly all the time, while the upper classes (such as the languid layabouts common in 19th century Russian literature and Jane Austen novels) had nothing but endless leisure. For the new middle class, aping the aristocracy for at least a week or two was as much an indicator that you could afford idleness as the modern sun tan in developed countries. (The middle classes in developing countries have no affection for the inadvertent sun tan, which clearly indicates you're a labourer or peasant.) In short, the whole point of a holiday was to flaunt your capacity for wasting time.
Over the decades, weekends and holidays became officially sanctioned, highly prized rights. Scientists and social commentators pointed out that doing nothing was good for your health and mental wellbeing. It engendered creativity, allowed us to live in the moment, and enabled the brain to process information and recharge its energies.
Yet in the 21st century, more and more of our idleness is sacrificed on the altar of consumerism, getting ahead, work, wealth and the fear of missing out. Travel is immune from none of these pressures. Worse, for many of us the value of travel is now triaged through social media, on which we constantly have to be boasting about new experiences, new sights and bucket lists; doing nothing is anathema to our contemporary need for connectedness. Yet in an age of constant change and increased speed, perhaps stillness might be more important than ever. "A poor life this if, full of care / We have no time to stand and stare," wrote Welsh poet WH Davies.
And so here I am these days, stopping to smell the roses, loitering with no intent whatsoever, worried less and less about seeing what my guidebook says I'm supposed to see. Occasionally I fear this means I've lost my travel fire, or just become lazy. Yet doing nothing isn't about ennui or inertia. It's about enjoying inaction and tranquillity as an experience in itself, and realising that being can be a rewarding as doing. Like Robert Louis Stevenson, I've grown to delight in dragging my heels along the road, less circumscribed by time and less fired up by the demands of traditional sightseeing.
A day of busyness in Rome is gone in a flash, as I ricochet around from St Peter's Basilica to the Forum and on to Hadrian's Villa, all the while fretting that I don't have time for the Villa d'Este or Vatican Museums. But a day doing nothing in Rome seems twice as long, and is measured out in coffee spoons, park benches and other random bouts of idle pleasures. I'm not the least sorry that I haven't seen Bernini's sculptures, the Temple of Vesta or inside the Colosseum. The life of Rome isn't pinned in a museum like a butterfly to its display board, but is all around in its short-skirted, dilapidated, statue-peering, cafe-chattering loveliness.
I'm with the great 17th century woman of letters Madame de Sevigne, who had the words "Bella cosa far niente (doing nothing is beautiful)" carved into a tree trunk on her country retreat. We must dare to do nothing and let the day drift away.
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