September 25, 2026 Post by : Editorial Slow Living

The rowboat came with the house, which is a strange thing to say, because the house did not come with much else. The previous owners had taken the appliances, the curtains, most of the light fixtures. They had left the rowboat, tied to a post at the end of the dock, green paint peeling, oars still inside. I took it as a sign, though of what, I could not have told you at the time.

That first summer, I took the boat out almost every evening. Not to fish. Not to exercise. Not to go anywhere. I just rowed out to the middle of the lake, shipped the oars, and drifted. Sometimes for an hour. Sometimes for two. The current did not care where I went, and neither did I.

The Discipline of Doing Nothing

It sounds easy. It is not. Doing nothing is one of the hardest things a modern person can attempt. The first few times, I lasted about ten minutes before I started reaching for my phone, which was not even in the boat, and then started making mental lists, and then started feeling guilty about the lists I was not completing. The boat drifted. I did not.

But I kept going out. I do not know why. Maybe because the lake was there, and the boat was there, and it seemed rude not to. Slowly, over weeks, something loosened. I stopped reaching for the phone that was not there. I stopped making lists. I started noticing things. The way the light changed on the water. The way the swallows came out at dusk, skimming the surface for insects. The way the far shore looked different from the middle of the lake than it did from the dock.

I started to understand that doing nothing is not the absence of activity. It is a different kind of activity. It is the activity of paying attention. It is the activity of being where you are. It is, I think, the activity that most of us have forgotten how to do, and the one we need most.

What the Drifting Taught Me

By August, I was going out twice a day. Morning and evening. I had a tan on the backs of my hands and a callus on my palm from the oars, which I used less and less, preferring to let the boat find its own way. I had stopped thinking of the drifting as practice for something else. It was the thing itself.

People ask me what I did that summer, and I tell them the truth, which is nothing. I drifted on a lake. I watched the light. I listened to the loons. I did not write a book or start a business or learn a language. I just sat in a small green boat and let the water take me where it wanted to go.

It was, I think, the most important summer of my adult life. Not because anything happened, but because nothing did, and I was finally able to be there for it. The boat is still at the end of the dock. The paint is still peeling. I still take it out, though less often now, because I have learned that you do not need a boat to drift. You just need to stop rowing.

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