Bordmagazin_August_2017

laziness _ BRINDISI 115
hour after I was meant to start (sorry, Mr
Geißler). And there wasn’t any brioche.
But now it’s 9.40am, my golden croissant
is oozing peach jam, the corpulent Italian
has been joined by a corpulent friend, and
the other tables are filling up. Three men
in polo shirts are engaged in eager debate,
a couple sits in silence, and four English
tourists have brought their own cushions.
I sip my cappuccino and suddenly feel
cautiously optimistic that doing nothing
could actually be quite interesting. I even
stop staring at the church clock’s hands.
“Doing nothing is successful when
you are simply able to be and able to look
around,” Björn Kern had told me. You don’t
need to go to Italy to do that, he says. In
fact, he’s the happy owner of a ramshackle
house in Oderbruch, eastern Germany,
with a bench beneath a pear tree at the
edge of his land. Instead of going on holiday
or hitting the hardware store, he likes to sit
on his bench in his spare time, watching
dragonflies. “I left the house mostly unrenovated
and I’m enjoying what’s there…
And that gives me what I wanted: freedom
and control over my own time.”
His advice to those wanting to try it for
themselves is, “Don’t overdo it. Don’t start
with an entire week and don’t travel far.”
Simply pause for an hour, wherever you
happen to be.
At 10.05am the three polo shirt-clad
men from the neighbouring table get
up and say ciao. At 10.10am they’re still
standing there, talking. Conversano
is a place where people seem to have a
leisurely attitude towards time. Women
with poodles walk across the square; a
man with a burgeoning beer belly sports
a T-shirt with the slogan “bedroom
warrior”. Doing nothing is surprisingly
entertaining. However, restlessness sets
in again at around 10.27am. I want to go to
the sea. Shouldn’t visitors to a town that
was populated back in the Iron Age at least
visit its museum or medieval castle? I urge
myself to be calm and idle again.
Jonas Geißler (38) had explained that
it’s about “not wanting to organise and
control everything… You need a kind
of joyful, experimental approach – a
humorous self-observation.” Or in Björn
Kern’s words, “Doing nothing isn’t just
about lying in a hammock. Even I’d get
bored of that eventually. It’s not so much
a lack of action as taking a closer look at
what you have and enjoying it.”
+
NOTHING FOR ALL
The Brazilian designer
Marcelo Bohrer founded
the Nadism Club, whose
name derives from the
Portuguese nada, the
word for “nothing”.
It promotes doing
nothing as a valuable
strategy for increasing
quality of life and wellbeing.
Bohrer has been
living in Munich since
2014 and organises
monthly meet-ups –
there’s one on
1 September in front of
the Monopteros Temple
in the Englischer Garten
– where participants
get together and do
nothing.
nadismclub.com