dolce far niente

The sweetness of doing nothing

5/27/2025 12:54 pm.

Somewhere along the way, you let time do its thing.

---

You take notice of the soft repetition of days.

There’s a rhythm to it—not unpleasant, just familiar. You wake, you move, you speak your lines with gentle precision. And somehow, the weeks fold in on themselves.

There’s comfort in the known, in the small rituals—the clink of a spoon in a cup, the way the sunlight creeps its way in through the blinds of the dining room. The rays paint over the orchids lining the windows. They’ve been consistent in growing beside you, silent and watching as you sip your coffee black and slip away until days turn dark.

You observe the steadiness of your surroundings, and in turn, life around you does the same, watching as your skin tightens and stretches, how your hair falls and frames, and how there will be days where smiles are too hard to be contained. There are minor fluctuations to your days, but it’s almost always the same. You think maybe this is what contentment feels like. Or maybe it’s something else. Something quieter.

Sometimes you catch your reflection in a window. You’re the same and yet also not. The plants bordering the image of you vary in length and color throughout the seasons, yet are still present, still living. The hours are just as full. Things function. You smile often, or enough. But there’s a faint echo that follows you, like a song you’ve forgotten the name of.

You think about how fast it all moves—not necessarily with urgency, but in a way that sneaks up on you. One moment you’re waiting for something to begin, and the next, you're already on the other side, anticipating what’s next. Time can often feel lost in our pursuit of living.

In your memory lies an excerpt from Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance that occasionally haunts you:

Then, when you’re no longer thinking ahead, each footstep isn’t just a means to an end but a unique event in itself. This leaf has jagged edges. This rock looks loose. From this place, snow is less visible, even though closer. These are things you should notice anyway. To live only for some future goal is shallow. It’s the sides of the mountain which sustain life, not the top. Here’s where things grow (Pirsig, 1974).

Sometimes it feels like time wraps around you in loops of remembering.

You collect fragments. A face from ten summers ago. A voice attached only to a memory across the ocean. The feeling of sticky air on warm walks nearing sunrise. A monologue from a film adored in adolescence. There is a yearning, but not for anything specific. Around and carried are remnants of the past. It’s the details that breathe life into you.

It’s easier now to settle into the gentle flow of the present, to let the current take you. But still, every now and then, there’s a flicker—a brief, unclassifiable ache. It feels like grasping at the remains of a dream that fades before you’ve savored it.

And so you continue—not out of resignation, but something simpler.

There are moments—rare, unscheduled—when you feel it. That stillness with no name. You're not chasing, nor climbing, not even wondering what’s supposed to come. You're simply there, in the hush of an unhurried afternoon, watching dust float in a sunbeam. Nothing presses. Nothing pulls. It is enough. You let it all be. Some call it surrendering. Some call it faith.

Italians embrace dolce far niente: the sweetness of doing nothing. The phrase rolls through your mind under the inescapable heat of a late afternoon by Lac de Rouffiac. The countryside is quiet, nearly barren of the French, save for the occasional distant engine or a rustle in the brush. The water barely moves. A breath, held.

There’s nothing extraordinary happening, and that feels like a gift too delicate to announce itself.

You remember once trying to count your days, to mold them into shapes and numbers and yield them to all things tangible and commended, as if time were something to bend and wield. But time doesn’t listen to anyone. It moves how it wants—not linear, but liquid. Sometimes it lingers in silence, sometimes it vanishes in a blink. It drowns and it dances and it leaves, despite how often we try to grip and gear and cling to it.

What if time isn’t meant to be managed? What if, instead, it is meant to be tasted? Savored? Sat with? Allowed? Perhaps it is meant to just be in.

Maybe time only feels lost in lack of presence.

You think of all the things that happened while you were waiting for something to happen.

There’s no bitterness in the realization. Just a sort of quiet nod. A softened awareness. You’re not late. You’re not early. You’re here.

There are plenty of things to still do: responsibilities to account for, priorities that require your efforts, paths that ask for your money, your knowledge, your spirit. You are given deadlines, your name plastered on applications filed away and still demanding your attention. There are routines awaiting your return in need of your care and requesting your urgency. There are others depending on your presence. You are in the minds of many across the globe, your name on the very tongues speaking languages foreign, your face in dreams unknown to you. There is no need to name the hours. You exist in all of them—in each changing environment, timezone, realms of thought.

Time drifts everywhere and you let it. You’re in it.

You are in the quaint village of Lanouaille in the Southwest of France, your feet buried in grains of white sand. The air is dry, the water cold, still.

You’re here and something within you remains untouched.

---

Sides notes—
I was recently in France for a beautiful friend’s wedding and too many unrelated moments Before and During and After and Now and Later have been stretching testing hurling me all sorts of directions and leading me to overexertion, until I realized: what if times of stress were solely moments made to reinvigorate faith? What if I surrendered to my physical body at this precise moment? What if I just sat with time? Practiced radical acceptance? I heard God finds you there