It’s not often you get five hours to yourself with absolutely nothing to do.
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I’m a big fan of doing nothing.
Time spent doing nothing cleans out the bell jar of the soul, leaving it ready to be filled up again with the litany of little tasks that worry our restless lives.
Every six months I get five or six hours to wander the streets of central Melbourne around St Vincent’s Hospital in Fitzroy while the chief gardener has an oil change.
I have realised over the years that far from being miraculous mysteries, our bodies are actually complex and interwoven machines which can be repaired and serviced just like cars.
New cars don’t need much servicing for the first few years, but older cars need regular attention with some parts replaced as the miles pile up.
So it is with us — our mechanics may be labyrinthine, but they are not unknowable.
For the past two years during the COVID-19 pandemic I have not been allowed into the womb of the hospital room to sit at my wife’s bedside and listen to the beeping monitors.
Instead, I am cast out into the brash and dazzling whiteness of a central Melbourne morning with no destination or task other than to find breakfast, a toilet and a park bench somewhere.
Last August, Melbourne was in lockdown and the streets were empty and grey with winter, shuttered windows and sparse, closed faces.
I found myself in Atherton Gardens watching people from the housing commission tower blocks walking their dogs or meeting on corners for hurried and distanced conversations.
Six months later on a Monday in February, the morning sunshine is like warm honey poured on my shoulders as I walk the length of Brunswick St from Victoria Parade to Alexandra Parade.
It’s 8.30am and only the breakfast cafes and little Asian groceries are open, but what a difference six months has made.
People are walking briskly to work or to college — or just to get their blood pumping. The street is pulsing to the disco hum of people on the move.
Traffic lights are breath-catching pauses for lines of square-shouldered cyclists, pedestrians with shoulder bags and water bottles, the growling utes of tradies, roaring garbage trucks, and the sullen stares of Uber drivers.
Orange and blue stand-up electric scooters are everywhere, the helmeted heads of riders gliding silently through the moving traffic like tarmac gondoliers.
There’s a woman marching towards me with her dachshund on a lead in one hand and a bluetoothed phone in the other.
She’s telling the surrounding air about her mother who is trapped and fading away in a nursing home.
Then there’s a Ford ute covered in green polyester carpet like a mobile lawn with a red-lipsticked vamp at the wheel.
She shakes jet black hair off her shoulders when the lights turn green and blasts off down the shiny street past the Naked for Satan tapas bar now closed and sleeping. It’s Monday morning for God’s sake.
City life, in all its ragged variety has returned.
Inner-cities are like living canvases of history with the changing fortunes and foibles of its citizens visible every day.
From Brunswick St, I turn down Gertrude St towards Carlton Gardens, past the faded glories of pillared and trellised Victorian homes where the sheep and gold merchants once lived.
Now they are home to vegan cafes and slow fashion and chic lighting shops with the odd peeling private rental apartment squeezed in between.
In a ground-floor window I see a printed sign on the sill in front of a musty lace curtain that says “DELETE INSTAGRAM”.
In a shuttered shop entrance there’s a blackboard with a message inscribed in beautiful white-painted script: “I see now that the circumstances of one’s birth are irrelevant. It is what you do with the gift of life that determines who you are”.
I walk on inspired by Takeshi Shudo’s quote from The Art of Pokemon: The Movie — a bridge between the banal and the profound.
Eventually I arrive at Carlton Gardens and the imperious Royal Exhibition Building now being used as a vaccination hub.
I find a tree near the water fountains and lie under it to read my book — Jonathan Franzen’s brilliant Crossroads.
The first sentence I read is: “According to scripture, earthly life is but a moment, but the moment seemed spacious when he was with her”.
And so it is when you have absolutely nothing to do.
John Lewis is a former journalist at The News
Columnist