On getting out of your head and learning to be unserious for a while

Henry Porter writes a lovely reflection about the importance of being unserious every now and then.

There is no case of seriousness in the adult male that cannot be treated by a fortnight with a magnifying glass, binoculars, fishing line, box of watercolour paints, bird book, or a sleeping bag in which to stay a night under the stars… whatever the crisis.

It’s about stepping out of ourselves and noticing the world around us more. How hard it is for many people to live less in the mind. Porter continues:

When I travel alone, I read a lot because I need to do something on the journeys and to fill the evenings, but long ago I gave up the hope that I would make any impression on the prairies of my ignorance with a fortnight of study in August. The classics that I wished I had read, the biographies that I felt I ought to get under my belt, all remained unmolested in my suitcase. As a result, holidays were tinged with guilt and sense of my own fecklessness.

So, I now take a couple of unserious paperbacks and a lot of equipment – most of the inventory above – and revert to boyhood.

A magnifying glass, for instance, is the cheapest source of entertainment I know, and I am genuinely astonished by the idea that you will find a million cameras in the luggage of those leaving for holiday this week, but not a single magnifying glass. I am rarely without one.

A few years ago – in the build-up to the Iraq invasion – I spent the best part of an afternoon on Snowdon looking at tiny aquatic creatures and plants that lived in a rock pool. I never reached the summit, but I still remember the detail of that little universe today.

The same applies to binoculars, which allow you to scout out a landscape, are useful in mountains and at sea, and add a lot when looking at old buildings and frescoes.

Also, I want to know what birds I come across – the blue rock thrush, golden oriole and eagle owl have been ticked off in my bird book – and I certainly want to sweep the night sky, and see whether the fisherman in the bay is having any luck.

A magnifying glass and binoculars help you live in the moment – oddly in contrast to the camera, which seems to me to have become just another demanding screen in our lives, squaring off and flattening experience and, crucially, putting it at one remove forever.

It is no more complicated than this: the most successful and relaxing holiday is the one that takes you out of your head and allows you to see, hear, taste and smell the immediate wonders of a new environment.

But despite the advocacy, Porter still feels guilty about it all!

At the back of my mind, I worry a little about the speed with which I become so completely un-cerebral, almost incapable of reading, or coherent thought. Still a brief period of mindless pleasure, free of the demands of ideas and events, as well as the view that we should always be on a path of self-improvement, is no bad thing.

We are bound by the laws of prudence and take ourselves far too seriously. Too many inner checks govern our behaviour and stop us seeing the wonders at our feet, and we are overwhelmed by stimuli to a degree that cannot be good for us.

Life is short, and whatever the problems of this year of unbelievably hectic news, it seems worth easing back for a spell and drinking in the sights and smells that will sustain us while grappling with the machine through the winter.