Ben and Me_ From Temperance to Humility - Cameron Gunn [58]
She’d have been right, of course. There were many things I could have been doing, but the honest point of the day was to take a break. I needed to work at not working.
After helping get my children off to school, I left on my regular bus. I wasn’t going anywhere, mind you. The idea was not to end up at any particular destination. If I had started to think about where to go, my unconscious mind would take me somewhere to do something. I wanted no somethings, so I needed to go nowhere—or at least nowhere I had planned.
It struck me as I exchanged small talk with my fellow travelers (most of whom seemed mildly concerned that I wasn’t in a suit and tie) that I knew where to go.
I live in a suburb on the eastern extremes of the city. I knew from a glance at a transit map that my regular bus, after dropping me off in the city center, then traveled to the western suburbs. Where, specifically, I had no idea. I’ve often joked to my bus mates (a group of acquaintances who share little more in common than a neighborhood and a friendly rapport in the rear seats of our aging bus) that we should skip work, stay on the bus, and see where it takes us. We all laugh, take a deep breath, and head off to the daily grind. Worker bees heading back to the hive. On Day 1 of Sincerity, however, it wasn’t a joke. On my sincere day off, I decided to see where the bus went.
“I’m doing it today,” I announced. “I’m seeing where this bus goes.” The reactions ranged from uninterested to mildly alarmed. Good to my word, I stayed on the bus as, one by one, my bus mates trudged off to another day of whatever it was they did all day. “Good luck,” said one man as he got off at his stop, as if I were heading off into the Outback with no guide. In hindsight, there may have been a touch of sarcasm in his voice. “Tell us where it goes,” said another. Maybe another touch of sarcasm.
As more and more stops passed, however, and I remained on the bus, a certain level of envy seemed to be developing among my fellow travelers. Like wishing someone off at the airport, there was a sense of “I wish I were going, too” among the regulars. It would not have been entirely surprising if someone threw down his or her briefcase and said, “The heck with work! I’m coming, too.”
Okay, in the spirit of Sincerity, that would have been a total surprise and a little creepy. I was just riding to the end of a bus line, not flying to Casablanca on a whim.
Eventually, only the bus driver and I remained. At that point, a minor flaw in my hastily conceived plan emerged. My refusal to disembark appeared to make the driver nervous. As we drove farther and farther toward the opposite end of the city, I could see him examining me in his rearview mirror, concern creasing his brow. Indeed, he seemed on the verge of pulling the bus over to the side of the road and making a break for it. Clearly no one had ever taken a bus out of downtown at this time of the morning. “Fear not, good sir,” I longed to say, “I am but a traveler on the bus to virtue.” I decided that wouldn’t quell his fears.
Fortunately, the extreme end of the run was only about a fifteen-minute ride. As we started our loop back through the western suburbs, picking up passengers at various stops, the driver relaxed in the presence of other commuters. When I finally rang the bell for a stop and disembarked back near the city center, he eyed me suspiciously.
{ Trickery and treachery are the practices of fools that have not the wits enough to be honest.}
The rest of the day was exactly what I had intended it to be: a day of “nothing.” A Seinfeldian celebration of antiachievement. I wandered, I ate, I wandered some more. I sat on benches and watched the world go by. Nothing industrious was accomplished. I did no “good,” I was not frugal. I was decidedly nonvirtuous . . . except I had been sincere. I needed a break, and I took it. Nothing was what I had needed, and nothing was what I had done.