Consider: The Gift is the Present
Ideas for opting into generative idleness
Ideas for opting into generative idleness, be it between festivities…or amid wintery days ahead.
1. The Color Walk:
Take a Color Walk: a nod to William Burroughs’ idea in “Ten Years and a Billion Dollars,” when he describes ‘walking on color’ through a city as a guide of your attention:
“Another exercise that is very effective is walking on colors. Pick out all the reds on a street, focusing only on red objects–brick, lights, sweaters, signs. Shift to green, blue, orange, yellow. Notice how the colors begin to stand out more sharply of their own accord. I was walking on yellow when I saw a yellow amphibious jeep near the corner of 94th Street and Central Park West. It was called the Thing. This reminded me of the Thing I knew in Mexico. He was nearly seven feet tall and had played the Thing in a horror movie of the same name, and everybody called him the Thing, though his name was James Arness. I hadn’t thought about the Thing in twenty years, and would not have thought about him except walking on yellow at that particular moment.”
(From “Ten Years and a Billion Dollars” by William S. Burroughs in The Adding Machine: Selected Essays, Arcade Publishing, New York, 1985.)
2. Low Stakes Specificity:
At a friends’ wedding, I was touched by the hyper-specificity of their vows, i.e. one promising to carry around granola bars and a few almonds in her bag as insurance for her wife’s known hunger-panic tendencies.
I invite this headspace as a way of being in relationship with another, or in discovering the ways that a utilitarian gesture can be an unexpectedly tender gift: recently I brought a friend a can opener, recalling that at a dinner party she’d opened a can of black beans with a knife. Think specific.
3. The Universe Whispers:
Something I remind myself when I’m beating my head against my computer keyboard or feeling like my brain is wrapped in a layer of cotton candy: the universe whispers.
[And I know you’re rolling your eyes because it sounds like a platitudinal embroidered pillow, but to me it means: you can bypass a lot by slowing down to listen.]
I forget this daily, but I remember it again just as often.
Moon Lists for in-between times:
• The Digital Workbook
• The Printed Workbook, Volume II
• The Special Edition Workbook — hand-bound in linen and exposed spine binding, available in limited edition and in 2 colors.
We also have—secretly—procured a few more decks of the sold-out Moon Lists Prompt Decks, with first access to paid subscribers:
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