Apparently there is an official kind of moodling: an open-source software resource for teaching and learning. That’s not the kind of moodling I mean. I’m thinking more like Brenda Ueland:

So you see the imagination needs moodling—long, inefficient, happy idling, dawdling and puttering.

My wife calls this “piddling” and it has an entirely positive connotation when she uses it. Moodling is about renewing the imaginative part of the mind and allowing ourselves to be creative. Much of life is doing stuff you have to do. It’s hard to maintain a fresh, open, and free outlook when completing tasks. You need to be able to goof off in order to do that.

Unfortunately we live in the world of work. I’m retired, but I used to be part of that world. In the world of work, one must work. And work is often dull and unrewarding. Even people like me who found something that suited them discovered that the actual job had little to do with the idea of the job. I was a teacher but spent most of my time on crowd control and record keeping. That’s just the nature of it despite the best efforts of many. I stuck it out for thirty years mostly because I had summers off! And I did my best to focus on the positive things. I had a good job by most people’s standards and I felt fortunate, but I would not have gone to work unless I got a paycheck. People talk about loving what they do but how many would show up just to do it if they didn’t have to worry about money?

And that’s what it is all about here in the US of A. Money. We have to have it. And moodling is contrary to money-making. You can’t moodle and be a good capitalist. You have to be working and striving and competing. You have to be improving all the time, being more organized and more efficient. That’s what makes innovation and that’s what begets growth and that’s how we get money. So moodle at your peril, bohemians!

But the creative, imaginative part of us needs nurturing. Even if we are CEOs we need to allow for moodling. You can’t solve problems entirely by attack mode. Sometimes you have to un-think about things in order to open new mental pathways and get around conceptual roadblocks. Creative people are good at breaking out of popular, established modes of thought. They see connections between seemingly disparate things. I used to think only some people had this ability, but I met many hundreds of youngsters in the course of my career and I can assure you they—and thus we—all have it.

We mostly don’t get to develop our creative sides. We have to work. We have to make some kind of accommodation with the economic system. We need money for food and rent and cars and clothes and doctors and phones and all the rest. Even if you don’t play the guitar or paint or whatnot you still need your imagination to prosper. And that requires care and feeding just like your muscles and organs do.

The world needs more grace, tolerance, diplomacy, empathy, humility, and kindness. Perhaps the mythological free marketplace that we worship will provide such things with the same alacrity it provides us with cheap jeans. Perhaps not. We’ll have to look for after-market solutions like more moodling. We have to imagine loving our enemies before we can actually do it, right? Thus we need to allow insight, ingenuity, and inspiration, and that comes about not by force of will or increased effort but by just the opposite, a sort of dreamy idleness, much like all children naturally have.

I’m a big boy and I know we have to till the land and harvest the seas to sustain our bodies. And we have to extract from the earth the materials we need to build our societies. But we also have to feed our minds. And if society gives us no time for that because we are too goddamn busy working, and if not working then worrying about work and money, what’s the point? We should not have to be grinding all the time. There should be ample time for resting and reflecting. Without that we can’t absorb all the inputs of all the days and thus we can’t learn and grow, that is imagine and create. We ought to value moodling a lot more than we do.