Goofing Off

When was the last time you just goofed off? I mean really did nothing. Nothing you had planned. I’ll admit it’s hard not to have something to do just about every minute of every day. And ironically if I want to goof off, I have to put it in my calendar. That seems backwards. With two kids and a hubby that is the way it works. And it is so worth it.

When we are on vacation, in our beloved Wellfleet it’s the one place we just wake up, see how we feel, what the weather is like and go hour by hour.  No wonder we love being there. Amazingly none of us get bored.

We wake up, eat, walk around the beach, read a book walk in the water, think about lunch, get lunch, take a nap, read a book, walk on the beach, think about dinner, make dinner and just hang out for long conversations and then maybe another walk on the beach.

Life is simple and we all know we are at our very best. I don’t think that I could have even considered that kind of vacation if I had not learned mindfulness. I am a do, do, do kinda girl who grew up in a do, do, do kinda family. Sitting idle was, well, lazy, unproductive, and clearly showed you were not very smart. Smart people kept busy. There were so many things to do.  Yet, our time in Wellfleet is critical to our family’s wellbeing and we take doing nothing when we are there very seriously.  It’s not that we do nothing, but we just don’t plan to do anything.

This is totally different from the family vacations we took when I was a kid. Our vacations were scripted well before we left the driveway with thick TripTiks from AAA. Every petrified tree stump was in there and my parent’s felt we needed to check every one of them out to make sure we had been thorough tourists.

We took trips from Louisiana to Seattle, driving a huge van with 4 kids, two parents, a grandma and a pop-up camper. There was no goofing off. On the occasional night my sister and I would meet some boys in the washer dryer area of the KOA and start “hanging out.” Within minutes my father would appear, dragging us back to the pop-up camper for some chores. He is German so that explains some of it. We just wanted to hang out, goof off. It was a KOA for goodness sake, how much trouble was there to get into?

Goofing off seems to get lost when we leave childhood. Let’s bring it back.

If you have to plan your goof off time, go ahead. But see if you can find 2 or 3 or 8 hours this week and plan NOTHING. Try just sitting around for a bit, under a tree or on a blanket in the backyard or in a warm bath. Just do nothing, by yourself. Go naked (I mean in the sense of no media. Or you can interpret it however you like.)

Let me know how it goes.

Be well,
Alice Dommert