On Puttering

The answer to what to do with yourself and also maybe how to build meaning, actually.

I’ve always admired the putterer. As a list-maker, I approach the act of Doing Things with a rigidity that the putterer shirks. The putterer’s approach is freeform, meandering. True puttering is wild, improvised jazz to the list-makers’ uniform, marching drum line.

My late stepdad was among the all-time greatest of putterers. Up at 5:30; make some scones; do the dishes; hang a screen door; reorganize the deep freeze; write a story; do the Sunday Times crossword in “the little room” (bathroom); take the dogs out; print some recipes; sharpen the knives; coat of paint on the baseboard. You get the idea. No hierarchy of tasks, more of a tapestry—little interwoven nudges of movement through a day.

Last year in January, I’d resolved to be more generous with my time; I had decided I was stingy with it. Which is sort of a stressful way to think about it, the feeling of always having to be so efficient, hence the lists. Puttering is a naturally generous reframing of time—the horizon is fluid, expansive. The timeframe is as large or small as the tasks you put into it.

So I was pretty tickled to find out that puttering—in the South, “piddling”—had become something of an internet trend. Sort of a natural synthesis of the radical rest movement and that meme about doing your silly little tasks. What’s more, there’s been some recent evidence, from both this silly little arch-capitalist and actual neuroscience, that time spent puttering is incredibly therapeutic.

@landontalksI was so surprised at what some people think piddlin’ means. To me- it means I’m living my very best life. If I’m piddling, I’m thriving. If hummingbirds are involved— even better. Everybody deserves a good piddlin’ day! What’s your favorite piddlin’ activity? Let’s discuss it! #southern #southernliving #southernaccent #southerncharm

Tiktok failed to load.

Enable 3rd party cookies or use another browser

@jarrett_sittonWhat Granny is doing any time we lose her lol

Tiktok failed to load.

Enable 3rd party cookies or use another browser

In the time since I made that resolution, there have been a lot of challenging things going on—grief and its ugly aftermath, for one—more recently, the dizzying feeling of watching my former town burn, and now, politics. What better time, I think, than to make oneself busy, primarily offscreen, and with this brazen sense of inefficiency? And, for those like me, who might be concerned about not getting enough done, I do wonder if puttering, as opposed to list-making, might get the job done better after all.

So here’s what I did: I stopped writing this post, tucked my to do list into a drawer, set a timer for one hour, and allowed myself to float around, puttering, to see what happened.

Here’s what I did:

• Brought speakers in from the barn and set them up in my studio

• Had a little breakfast

• Primed some new shelves for our bookcase, washed the paint brush, and put the primer by the front door to go into the barn

• Considered taking off clothes and lying on acupressure mat, decided against

• Packed up and loaded the car with clothes to bring to our local consignment shops later today

• Organized my kids’ hand-me-downs

• Continued halfway writing this post in my head, sort of gently muttering to myself (I’m normal?)

• Pulled off all the days of my daily calendar that I’d missed

• Put away my camera and it’s accessories, which were strewn about after having recently shot an upcoming zine

• Stretched—what is wrong with my knee?

• Took photos of clothes and shoes to sell on Noihsaf Bazaar

• Stripped the covers off the couch and put them in the washing machine

• Noticed that almost all laundry detergent bottles are empty, brought those down to the recycling

@rosadeleeFor the folks who guilt themselves into “doing something” on days off when they really wanna just putter around the house for a day

Tiktok failed to load.

Enable 3rd party cookies or use another browser

OK, yes, I can see that setting a timer for one hour to see what you can accomplish and then writing it all down at the end is sort of ~not really the assignment~ in a certain way. I’m healing!

That said, the daily calendar I mention above has little missives—including moon facts—for each day. Today’s read, “Just trust yourself, then you will know how to live,” which reminded me of a particularly resonant quote I seem to come back to from Carl Jung. It’s a letter he’s written in response to a woman asking, essentially, how to have a meaningful life, to which he writes,

Your questions are unanswerable because you want to know how one ought to live. One lives as one can. There is no single, definite way for the individual which is prescribed for him or would be the proper one. If that’s what you want you had best join the Catholic Church, where they tell you what’s what. Moreover this way fits in with the average way of mankind in general. But if you want to go your individual way, it is the way you make for yourself, which is never prescribed, which you do not know in advance, and which simply comes into being of itself when you put one foot in front of the other. If you always do the next thing that needs to be done, you will go most safely and sure-footedly along the path prescribed by your unconscious. Then it is naturally no help at all to speculate about how you ought to live. And then you know, too, that you cannot know it, but quietly do the next and most necessary thing. So long as you think you don’t yet know what this is, you still have too much money to spend in useless speculation. But if you do with conviction the next and most necessary thing, you are always doing something meaningful and intended by fate.

Task to task, day to day, with no set plan in mind and you’ll arrive at the life you are building. In other words, puttering.