Tales From Exit 22 by Al Batt

“What are you doing?”

“Nothing.”

“Do you need any help?”

That’s a typical exchange as our local Loafers’ Club meets each day at a local eatery. We are men who putter around in yards or sheds. Some claim that we’re guilty of bumbling — wandering around in a confused way without purpose. We wouldn’t deny it. We are always up for doing nothing. If we had a club mascot, it’d be the sloth. We whistle while we don’t work. There is an Italian phrase for puttering around — “dolce far niente,” which means the pleasant relaxation in carefree idleness, the sweetness of doing nothing. We are sweetness personified. We avoid unnecessary thought. We do nothing for about an hour, talk about how we could do even less, adjourn the meeting and then go home and rest. Doing nothing is tiring.

The Club’s motto is, “Don’t put off doing nothing. True joy comes from having too much to do and then not doing it.”

That’s not a challenge for us.

When it comes to doing nothing, we don’t procrastinate.

It’s not always easy. Malcolm Forbes said that doing nothing is the hardest work of all. Winnie the Pooh disagreed by proclaiming, “They say nothing’s impossible, but I do it every day.”

A friend told me that she was busy doing nothing and she couldn’t do anything about it. When someone tells me that they are doing nothing, a cartoon bubble forms over my head that shows a to-do list with the word “nothing” crossed off.

When my mother asked me what I was doing and I replied,”Nothing,” she’d ask me how I knew when I was finished. A recurring cartoon shows one character asking another, “What are you doing?”

“Nothing,” is the reply.

“You did that yesterday.”

“I know. I wasn’t finished.”

I laugh when I see signs similar to this one, “On this spot on April 1, 1858, nothing happened.”

I remember being a freshman in high school or maybe I was a freshman in junior high school, I’m never sure which. I know that I was too immature to be sophomoric and it was during the noon hour. We were playing football outside the school. It was a lovely day and we reveled in a bit of freedom from books and teachers’ dirty looks. There wasn’t enough room on the school’s lawn to fit a football field, so we included a busy street as part of it. Not the best idea, but we hadn’t put a lot of thought into it or anything else. What could possibly hope wrong?

Perry Haugen was the quarterback. He told me to go long and he’d hit me with a bomb.

The ball was snapped and I went long. Actually, I went long and longer.

There was a big truck going by. I thought of the vehicle as a blocker that would clear my path to a touchdown after I snagged the pass.

I ran past the rear of the truck.

I caught the ball with ease and then the unexpected happened.

Clang!

The truck was hauling a lengthy steel beam.

I met that steel beam head-on.

The truck driver kept going. He wasn’t aware of my presence. It never occurred to him that a helmetless football player would be running into his load.

I went down like a helmetless football player who had been hit by a steel beam.

Perry took me to the doctor’s office. It wasn’t an unfamiliar place to me.

The friendly physician looked in his “hit by a steel beam” case file. I could see that it was empty.

The doctor asked me what I’d been doing before I was hit by the steel beam.

“Nothing,” I said.

“You must have been doing something,” said Doc Olds.

“We were playing football,” answered Perry, acting as my mouthpiece.

Doc Olds began putting big stitches in the large cut above my eye.

“You’d have been better off doing nothing,” advised the wise Doctor Olds.

There are times when we look as if we’re doing nothing, but at a cellular level, we’re very busy. It’s impossible to do nothing. It may be impossible to do nothing, but I try.

I like staring at clouds or flowers. I love going for walks. I have found these things to be useful in incubating thoughts and ideas. They are problem-solving exercises. They are methods of sanding rough edges.

If you have nothing to do, do it.

It might save you from being hit by a steel beam.

Al Batt’s columns appear every Sunday and Wednesday.