The beauty of doing nothing

Here in the US, we’re celebrating Labor Day Weekend, which symbolically marks the end of summer for us and is usually spent (for me, anyway) as a day of rest.

My friend Margie, the art teacher at our school, insisted that I read this book that she told me ‘changed her life’. She practically forced it upon me and promised me that I would love it. She also told me she would beat me up if I didn’t return it.

I was skeptical as to loving it but then I thought, well – she has been pretty happy lately.

I’m reading Eat, Pray, Love by Elizabeth Gilbert.

And I love it. I love this book.

Margie was right.

I love the way the author writes. She has an absolute gift for the English language and is an artist when it comes to stringing words together, something with which I’ve always had trouble. She’s also quite funny, even when explaining her depression during the long and terrible divorce from her husband.

Right now, I’m only at the beginning of the book and am loving the fact that she went to Italy just to learn Italian, which is the most beautiful language in the world, she says.

Apparently, the Italians are the masters of il bel far niente which means “the beauty of doing nothing.” And the more exquisitely and delightfully you can do nothing, the higher your life’s achievement.

I realized as I was reading these words in the book that I was practicing il bel far niente, something I often do on the weekends.

I have the use of the borrowed 105mm macro lens until Tuesday, and have been trying to make the most use of it until then.

And I think I’m slowly falling in love with it this lens.

In fact, I know I am.

I love playing around in Photoshop, too. I downloaded a few new fonts from Dafont.com and used this one called Jane Austen for Miss Blackie’s photo.

I also experimented taking photos in direct sunlight, something I rarely do. I don’t like the glare that the sun causes. So I set the camera to P (Program mode), the ISO to the lowest it goes on my Nikon D80 (100), and the white balance to Direct Sunlight.

I’ve also been keeping my playback mode for the monitor set to the one that lets me see if there are potentially overexposed areas. The areas will blink if overexposed.

Sometimes it didn’t bother me that I had a little glare, such as the photo above.

But I thought this one had a little bit too much on the bottom left corner.

Even though I was doing SOMETHING and not nothing, I felt I was doing it delightfully and exquisitely.

I hope to have a lot of pictures to share with you this week. Tomorrow, my husband wants to visit Amish country. They don’t celebrate Labor Day there, so they should all be out and about. And then I will come home and read some more.

It sounds delightful to me.

Until later, my friends . . .