I Loaf and Invite My Soul

Author

Lucy Petroucheva
May 10, 2026

Today, the Hudson River was remarkably peaceful. The weather was perfect: slightly cool, with the sun beaming hard enough to heat up my skin. No wind — just the gentle lapping of water and the murmurs of families out for Mother’s Day. The Manhattan skyline was misty and the sailboats were free. I bathed in the light and couldn’t bring myself to get up because there was nowhere else I could imagine wanting to be.

I moved through the rest of the day with my eyes half-open, wandering in a sleepy bliss, smiling at everyone I saw. I was reminded of how much I love to loaf.

I’ve always been a loafer. I spent a lot of time by myself growing up, riding my scooter or daydreaming in my room. Sometimes I’d lift my head and realize that more than an hour had gone by in curious and contented rumination.

When you’re loafing, something very right has happened.

There’s nowhere you feel you need to be, and your mind has slowed down, and you’re at this perfect level of alertness, just kind of meandering like you might have as a child. You definitely don’t set out to loaf; you only find yourself loafing. Usually, you end up making some sense of your life, though you’re not trying to do that. There are absolutely no agendas in a loaf. There are also no timelines.

I believe in loafing. In being useless. In allowing a peace and joy and rest to be produced in you. As Whitman said, you end up finding your soul somewhere in a loaf.

1. Excerpts from Song of Myself | Walt Whitman

I lean and loafe at my ease . . . observing a spear of summer grass.
…

Welcome is every organ and attribute of me, and of any man hearty and clean, not an inch nor a particle of an inch is vile, and none shall be less familiar than the rest.

…

I am satisfied . . . I see, dance, laugh, sing.

…

Loafe with me on the grass . . . loose the stop from your throat

…

How we lay in June, such a transparent summer morning

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I witness and wait

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I exist as I am, that is enough

Distant Thunder — Andrew Wyeth

2. Paintings | David Hettinger

I felt understood when I first saw David Hettinger’s paintings. He just totally gets it.

3. Quote | Source Unknown

I first heard this cheeky little line from my Eastern Religions Professor, Dr. Feleppa.

I enjoy a busy schedule as much as anyone, but some of my most sacred moments are ones when I’m alone, grateful in the aloneness, and melted into the world.

4. Excerpts from How to Do Nothing | Jenny Odell

Odell is a big fan of third places, and she’d be pleased to know that I loafed in one all morning.

Life… [is] more than an instrument, and therefore something that cannot be optimized.
…

Solitude, observation and simple conviviality should be recognized, not only as ends in and of themselves, but inalienable rights belonging to anyone lucky enough to be alive.

…

The point of doing nothing as I define it isn’t to return to work refreshed and ready to be more productive, but rather to question what we currently perceive as productive. My argument is obviously anti-capitalist, especially concerning technologies that encourage a capitalist perception of time, place, self, and community.
…

The highest goal is the mere experience of life.

…

[We are] in a situation where every waking moment has become the time in which we are making our living, and when we submit even our leisure for numerical evaluation via likes on Facebook and Instagram . . . time becomes an economic resource that we can no longer justify spending on ‘Nothing’. It provides no return on investment; it’s simply too expensive.

…

This is real. Your eyes reading this text, your hands, your breath, the time of day, the place where you are reading this – these things are real. I’m real too. I’m not an avatar, a set of preferences, or some smooth, cognitive force; I am lumpy and porous, I’m an animal, I hurt sometimes, and I’m different one day to the next. I hear, see, and smell things in a world where others also hear, see, and smell me. And it takes a break to remember that: a break to do nothing, to just listen, to remember in the deepest sense what, when, and where we are.

5. Quote | Mary Oliver

Me too, Mary.

Enjoy sun-drenched idleness, my friends.

Noon - Rest from Work — Vincent Van Gogh