What is Loafe?

From the top:

• Welcome back, friends.

• Happy Sunday. Happy June.

• Read time: you’ll see

• Meme theme: I Think You Should Leave

See you out there.

I started this newsletter because, for a long time, the order of my thoughts has been frantic. Or maybe scattered - thin - is a better visual. I wanted some way to work out this desire to move towards slower things and give less power to pure thinking and evaluating. I wanted to pay attention instead. To, as Walt Whitman so nicely says, “…loafe and invite my soul.”

One of my main concerns in recent years has been whether I can know, and how I can know, if I am living in the center of life (spiritually, I would call this the heart of God, a la Kahlil Gribran) or if I’m moving about in the margins, jumping from thin and whispy nothings that don’t seem to anchor to much of a center.

I wonder if I’m wandering towards the center - able to make statements like “I am…” or “I believe…” or “I want to…” - or whether I’m distracted by things like hyper-concern for my career, Linked-In presentation value, and a focus on being pissed off that I’m thinking about those two things as much as I am.

These have been very strong, and very present thoughts. The striking thing about them is that there’s a pervasive self-concern that continues to reinforce the thoughts. Inherently, they are not negative, but my exercise of them has felt negative, rather than thinking that inspires an evolution of thinking or the self in noticeable ways.

So, this newsletter. Welp, it’s an attempt to frack these thoughts. If I inject writing into the thinking, weekly, hopefully, there’s an extraction of a resource. One that can be traded or used in situations to keep me in the center of life instead of chasing the things that traditionally push me back out to the margins.

Not sure if that metaphor fully works, but it does in my head.

And here’s where the concept of “loafe” comes in, and where largely, up until last week, I’ve forgotten about it.

Instead of doing more to find the center of life, I originally set out to do less. I set out to wander about as if eyes facing out into the world would be a better teacher than a mind engaged in the allure of fixing the ‘problem’ of having the perfect job, or what to do about health insurance, or whether there’s any point in saving for college for my kids because what will AGI do to college in like 15 years? And on a smaller scale, do I text my friends enough?

All of that to say, last week I found a slice of loafe. I had nothing to do, no next move, and instead of mowing the yard, or moving this trinket from one end of the house to the other, or making a cup of coffee, or going on a run, I went and sat on a bench downtown. I rode my bike to a street in my downtown where people often walk by.

I’d imagined doing this for months. For months I’d thought it would be nice to just go and sit while the sun shines and people walk around or drive by. No phone, no book, no nothing. Just loafe. When I wrote about resistance a few weeks ago, this is precisely how it shows up in my life.

And here’s the brilliant thing that happened:

Nothing.

I didn’t see anything particularly important - just people walking and shopping. Nothing particularly useful was learned - I just sat with a clear mind and nowhere to go. And that made all of the difference.

That, dear friends, is why I started this newsletter and called it Deep Loafe. I know good and well that 99% of the time I will live frantically and with some obscene pace that’s trying to get to a place I don’t even know I want to go.

Instead, I want to slow it all down as often as I can. I want to be awake enough to laugh with my kids. To sit on the front porch with my wife. To weed in the garden for 5 minutes and not have that mean anything about the trajectory of the bush bean’s success. Just weed the garden for 5 minutes.

Just. Loafe.

a little more inspiration from Whitman

Stuff I’ve Been Into

Readies

Another poem. I’m poem-happy this week.

Quote I’m thinking a lot about

“Dost thou reckon thyself only a puny form

When within thee the universe is folded?”

― Baha'u'llah

Question I’m asking

When was the last time I went a day without purchasing something?

Recipe

When I sent out the feedback machine a few weeks ago, a friend told me they wanted to see some recipe suggestions. I’m no chef, but here’s a Chat-GPT-cultivated lemon garlic chicken pasta dish I cooked.

If you like Deep Loafe and wanted to tell a friend to subs, I wouldn’t be mad.

Welp have a great week. Thanks for reading.

Andrew