One handful with tranquility

How I learned to love the lazy me

When I read Stillness is the Key by Ryan Holiday, I was struck by this amazing passage about Winston Churchill:

Winston Churchill had a productive life. He first saw combat at age twenty-one, and wrote his first bestselling book about it not long after. By twenty-six, he’d been elected to public office and would serve in government for the next six and half decades. He’d write some ten million words and over forty books, paint more than five hundred paintings, and give some twenty-three hundred speeches in the course of his time on this planet. In between all that, he managed to hold the positions of minister of defense, first lord of the admiralty, chancellor of the exchequer, and of course, prime minister of Britain, where he helped save the world from the Nazi menace. Then, to top it off, he spent his twilight years fighting the totalitarian communist menace.

As Paul Johnson, one of Churchill’s best biographers, would write, “The balance he maintained between flat-out work and creative and restorative leisure is worth study by anyone holding a top position.”

Now that is a full and varied life. But this is what really got me thinking:

Johnson as a seventeen-year-old, decades before his own career as a writer, met Churchill on the street and shouted to him, “Sir, to what do you attribute your success in life?” Immediately, Churchill replied, “Conservation of energy. Never stand up when you can sit down, and never sit down when you can lie down.” Churchill conserved his energy so that he never shirked from a task, or backed down from a challenge. So that, for all this work and pushing, he never burned himself out or snuffed out the spark of joy that made life worth living.

This strange contradiction caught my attention. How can someone with this attitude also be this prolific? This question niggled at me. And it forced me to rethink my attitude toward productivity.

But before I dive into what that change is, we need a bit of background about me.

For a long time, I’ve been aware of a propensity I have toward laziness and passivity. As a teenager, my energy was 100% go with the flow. And later on in life, when experiencing the rewards of healthy ambition, I tried to reign in this tendency wherever I could. When weighing up a decision, I’d ask myself:
Am I just taking the easy option?
Am I afraid of trying and failing?
Am I afraid of how much this will demand of me?
Am I procrastinating from what really matters?

I developed a desire to push myself beyond my normal boundaries. To seek out discomfort, embrace ambition and try to be more proactive in my relationships and work-life.

But, I must confess, there has been this slow and creeping sense that this has not been working for me. Part of me feels that my pace of life has begun to snuff out that joy which he mentions. I find myself shirking responsibilities (or at least wanting to), becoming impatient with surprises, and longing for solitude just to keep resentment at bay. Early signs of overwork.

What struck me about this story about Churchill is the seeming contradiction here. He is this eminently hard-working and industrious person, who also seems to love his creature comforts, hold religiously to his daily routines and forcefully prioritize rest.

So much rest.

The passage goes on to say that he is taking two baths a day, having long siestas, working from bed for hours, reciting poetry at lunch, feeding the swans and strolling in the garden daily.

This is clearly a man who loves his leisure.

And that quote: “Never stand up when you can sit down, and never sit down when you can lie down.” Isn’t that just laziness?

Surely this wouldn’t work for me as well, would it? I wouldn’t get anything done!?

The ugly reality, it turns out, is that maybe I haven’t learned to be productive, I have just learned instead to distrust my own instinct of when to relax.

And maybe Churchill can be as lazy as he likes as long as he is still courageous and dutiful and generous. Ryan captures this in his description of Churchill’s motivations:

Churchill conserved his energy so that he never shirked from a task, or backed down from a challenge. So that, for all this work and pushing, he never burned himself out or snuffed out the spark of joy that made life worth living.

I have also noticed that there are positive and useful motivations often hidden within my laziness. Those who are ‘lazy’ are much quicker to give up on schemes, plans and patterns of behaviour that are not working. They have a more boundaried approach to nonsense, which is a sadly underrated aspect of maturity and quality of love. Since I have seen this, I now hold this trait responsible for much of the spiritual and emotional growth that I’ve seen in my own life.

As I’ve been thinking this through, I am reminded of the verse in Ecclesiastes:

Better one handful with tranquility than two with toil and chasing after the wind. —Ecclesiastes 4:6

Or another translation:

One hand full of rest is better than two fists full of labor and striving after wind.
—Ecc 4:6

In context, the verse paints a picture of two types of workers. The lazy worker ‘folds their hands’ in a posture denoting passive resignation and thus is ruined by their inaction. The second worker takes two handfuls of ‘toil’ and simply has no room for enjoying life with their hands full of striving. To put it starkly, the message is something like two handfuls of labour are worthless if they cost you your peace in the long run.

Better one handful with tranquility than two with toil and chasing after the wind.

When you are following your calling, or you have a vision or passion or mission that you are pursuing in life, it can make it hard to truly believe this reality: that the best way to go ‘all in’ on living a purposeful life actually involves a lot of rest, and fun, and even pointlessness. And now I know that instead of being afraid of being lazy and paranoid about whether I am resting too much, I can just focus on being courageous and generous and responsible instead.

Godspeed,

TMo