Frank: Is Sloth a Deadly Sin? And Am I Guilty of It?

I was about to do some yard work when my wife returned from her walk bearing a book she’d found in a Little Free Library. The title: “Find Your Inner Sloth: A Journal Celebrating Slow Living.”

Perfect timing! 

I refer you to page 74: “Sedentary stillness is soothing to the soul. Why get up and do something when you don’t have to?”

Did I have to mow the lawn? It could wait. 

Be like “the world’s most blissfully inactive mammal,” advises author Oliver Luke Delorie, and “practice the art of doing nothing.”

If you’re wondering if it’s possible to find your inner sloth and write a book at the same time, I can assure you that it is. I’ve written two books and I believe I found my inner sloth long before I wrote either of them. (Had I not, I’d have a whole shelf-load of books to my name by now.)

Oddly, for a 192-page book devoted to sloth, the only mention of sloth’s place among the seven deadly sins is an oblique one: “Whoever used sloth as a noun to describe someone going to that place called hell for enjoying a little inactivity had a limited view of the world and their priorities are out of whack.”

Our society’s anti-inactivity priorities may indeed be out of whack, but they are indeed our society’s priorities. They certainly were my mom’s. She cursed her three children with a commandment to be productive every day. 

I try. But I also rebel. Is a bike ride productive? A dinner party? A sunset walk to the Arboretum?

Mostly, I berate myself for not accomplishing as much as I hoped I would – you know, Nobel Prize in Literature, titan among Communications scholars, enough money to buy a house by the sea and an apartment in New York.

Maybe we only have so much control over how much we achieve. I picture each of us drawing on an internal fuel tank. The tanks of the world’s movers and shakers are industrial-sized — you know, the ones that look like submarines. The rest of us make do with 20-gallon canisters like the ones attached to a backyard barbecue or maybe even the 16-ounce bottles that power a camp stove. 

Those of us with tiny fuel tanks can push ourselves to do more, but discipline will only take us so far. The energy just isn’t there.

According to this line of thinking, if I coulda done this, that or the other, I woulda. 

Yeah, I know. Talk of tanks is a way of avoiding facing up to my own laziness.

Speaking of which: Naptime!

**

Where was I? Oh, yes: Delorie’s book called to mind Paul Simon’s “59^th Street Bridge Song,” which could be the sloth national anthem: “Slow down, you move too fast…” 

Slothfully looking up the song’s lyrics led me to a YouTube clip of Liberace and the Young Folk covering the song on the “The Red Skelton Hour” in 1968, which I commend to your attention as one of the most embarrassing three minutes in television history. 

“Find Your Inner Sloth” isn’t nearly as bad as Liberace in flower-power pants, but it’s pretty dippy, with page after page of exercises like “Write down some things that are just fine the way they are” and “Rest your head on this page, close your eyes, and see if you can think of nothing for 5 seconds.”

Still, there’s a lot to be said for slowing down, for letting “the busy bees buzz blindly by in search of who-knows-what,” as our overly alliterative author puts it.

One can, however, take doing as little as possible too far. Consider this passage: 

“What do you think a sloth thinks about all day? How to solve global warming? How to get the bug gut stain out of their fur? They couldn’t care less about those things.”

I suspect if a sloth’s habitat were becoming uninhabitable, it would care a great deal about global warming. Indeed, elsewhere in the book, the author provides space for us to write a letter to the president, “urging him to save the rainforests and our sloths.”

You would also think Delorie’s beloved sloths would be risk- and change-averse. Yet he encourages us sloth wannabes to “take creative risks. You have to bet big to win big.” Sounds very unsloth-like to me. 

In fact, maybe Delorie has it all wrong and we need to lose our inner sloth rather than find it: What is all that scrolling we do, if not slothful? Maybe what has me on a one-way trip to Palookaville are all the hours I spend doing word puzzles and following baseball.  

Maybe Delorie resolves his book’s internal contradictions on a page I didn’t read: Slothfully, I only skimmed the 192 pages of “Find Your Inner Sloth” and didn’t do any of the exercises. The author should be pleased.