Lazy days...

Today, as sticky and as hot a day as one would wish to experience, I find myself in the slightly frayed-at-the-edges, albeit relaxed, environs of the Betty Boop Bar in Kanchanaburi. The place’s air conditioning seems to have been installed by someone who failed to understand the concept as the bar opens out directly onto the street, the opening being the entire width and height of the premises. It does ‘benefit’ from a plethora of fans though, doing what fans do in these conditions. Essentially, that consists of moving hot air from one part of the bar to another, in a very similar way to fan heated oven, with roughly the same effect. Pride of place is taken by an eight foot by four foot snooker table that the locals, as well as the expats, like to play pool on. As the table is essentially built for snooker, with the much smaller pockets that come with that game, the version of pool played here is very tactical in nature, multi ball breaks being fairly exceptional. Such amenities are at least free here though, as opposed to the slot style tables that are to be found in the UK.
In these conditions it is necessary to be somewhat economic in the way that one spends one’s energy; any drastic increase in output tends to mean that one is drenched in sweat in under a minute. As someone who both enjoys exercise and feels a need to indulge in such activity, it has become necessary for me to literally get up at the crack of dawn, just after 6 a.m., in order to do an hour’s juggling, yoga and planking. A couple of times in the last two weeks, due to slightly overindulging the previous night, I failed to start exercise until 7.30 a.m. This was a drastic mistake on my part and led to some unpleasant heat exhaustion like symptoms similar to those I suffered in Chiang Mai four years back. A certain amount of common sense is required and the pragmatism to understand the beneftits of laziness in an environment such as Thailand’s.
Oddly though, the enforced laziness that the environmennt here necessitates is, for this flaneur at least, often somewhat paradoxical in nature. Despite strolling around the place at the pace of a happily stoned two-toed sloth having an easy day, and spending much time imbibing an endless variety of fruit smoothies and other such hydrating concoctions, I seem somehow to get more done than I manage back in the UK. On my last trip to SE Asia I consumed innumerable books on finance and investing, wrote several articles, read half a dozen novels and spent much time investigating the possibility of a new book, even completing in draft form the first four chapters. All this whilst zig zagging back and forth between Guangzhou, Dongguan, Hainan Island and Thailand.
Even on the present trip I find myself studying the ever elusive Mandarin (it is actually getting better now - at last!), continuing my attempts to improve the schoolboy French I have had for years, reviving this blog, consuming George Orwell novels and researching a new idea for a novel, whilst on the physical side I manage an hour’s yoga and juggling at dawn most mornings. All this on top of some very pleasant social activities, enjoying in-depth conversations with several of the interestingly philosophical souls one finds in Kanchanaburi, and socialising for several hours each evening, which seems to mostly consist of playing pool with locals and ex-pats and watching the odd football match in the bars. This is, all in all, a fair amount of activity yet feels as if it is all done at such a leisurely pace that almost everything from the juggling to the conversations, from the French to the novel, feels like an easy-going indulgence.
I remember noticing this phenomena in another blog (Busy Doing Nothing) a couple of years or so back. Oft times, those who seem to be buzzing around like the proverbial blue-assed fly, flitting at ever increasing pace from one unfinished task to another at breakneck speed whilst driving themselves into a froth-mouthed frenzy, somehow seem to manage to be both forever short of time and remarkably unproductive. As ever fooled by the superficial, we often seem to confuse activity with productivity, the appearance of busy-ness with actually getting things done. P.G Wodehouse was famous for spending each morning in his Southern French villa leisurely writing on the verandah and the rest of the day indulging in the pleasant lifestyle that that particular part of the World offers. He did this for years, but left behind a remarkably large body of work that has easily endured the test of time in the decades since.

As I finish this blog sitting beside the River Kwai and gazing out across the slow flowing waters on yet another pleasant evening, I find myself once more appreciating the benefits of slowness, of taking one’s time, of savouring the flavour of one’s very existence. Often in modern culture it feels as if we are forever chasing, faster and faster, towards some potential future. Indeed, life itself is often framed in this way, a continuous quest to prepare ourselves for a part of life that is yet to come. It is all just imagination, of course. These futures scarcely ever come to pass, and even when they do they are often not at all as we had imagined them. The reality of marrying that dream girl, of getting that yearned for promotion, of buying that house is often really rather disappointing. Rather than forever projecting ourselves into such fantasies, perhaps it would be wiser to realise that there is but one time when we are truly alive, and that time is right now, in this moment
Live it well.