Lying fallow

I love my phone because it means I can (almost) always, (almost) everywhere, do a search.

I can fill up any spare time with new images, ideas and information. It's a great luxury - it's like having a reference library, personal assistant and messenger service in my pocket. I make notes, update the shared shopping list, keep in touch. I slightly struggle to remember how life actually felt in the pre-smart phone days, let alone the pre-mobile ones.

I can be always doing something.

But this blaze of productivity drowns out the moments of silence, of vulnerability, of serendipity. I distract myself from worry in the doctor's waiting room. I protect myself from social awkwardness in the after school pick up playground. I'm never at a loose end.

Being productive is great, but it's blinkered. It requires blinkers. We canter down the focus road, seeking to avoid being distracted or unnerved by irrelevant things to right or left. A 'window' in your calendar is asking to be filled. We think of open space as empty space - we call land that isn't beautiful to us or useful to us 'waste land'.

Crop rotations used to include fallow time and it supported the rest of the cycle. The wild flower meadows kept the pollinators going between the short flowering of crop, as well as allowing the soil to recover and the small animals to have somewhere to nest, forage and hunt. Some farmers are starting to experiment with bringing back strips of fallow, wild areas and giving space to their hedgerows.

In urban and office life, we must defend the fallow spaces in the day from smart phones and productivity. I'd like to point out that I mean defend the genuinely fallow time. Scheduling a yoga class, joining an educational guided nature walk or meditation group is not fallow - although it probably is worth doing. Fallow time is weed-filled, and non-productive.  Fallow is a pyjama day where the laundry doesn't get done. If it's a fallow day then you can answer a knock on the door without a change of plan, you can turn a quick phone call into a long chat because nothing is going on. You might end up tidying a cupboard because you're looking for the risotto rice and it's right at the back. But you didn't plan to, or it's not fallow time.

Fallow time offers recuperation, an openness to happenstance, and asks you to stop living your life so that your life can live you. Mark some in your diary now, and then visit your life without farming it. You might be surprised by what starts growing.