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Garrison Keillor’s Convincing Argument for Autumnal Laziness

2 minute read
By Lily Rothman

It’s here: autumn.

Tuesday is the official first day of the season, which means that summer is officially over, and not just in a no-wearing-white kind of way. But, as Garrison Keillor argued in the pages of TIME back in 2001, that doesn’t mean that a summery lifestyle has to be over too.

At the time, the A Prairie Home Companion host and sometime-TIME columnist had recently undergone open-heart surgery and had spent over a month doing, as he put it, nothing. And, he found, nothing was something that was pretty great to do:

Back when I was a kid, I spent a summer picking potatoes at a neighbor’s farm. Slouched up and down the rows, stooped over, dragging a burlap bag full of spuds, dust in my nostrils, body all aching and racked with pain, and it seems to me that I have been picking potatoes in one form or another ever since. The boss man, Mr. Marse, kept telling me that potato picking is a great challenge and a boon to civilization and the manly thing to do and that if I quit working, my life would lose purpose and meaning and I would be unable to bear the shame.

You were wrong about that, Mr. Marse.

Rather, he argued, being lazy helps you get in touch with the real you — and the end of summer shouldn’t mean the end of that.

You can read the full essay here, free of charge, in TIME’s archives: In Praise of Laziness

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Write to Lily Rothman at lily.rothman@time.com