On inefficient loitering

Most North Americans of my vintage tend to be goal oriented. It hadn't occured to me that there was any other way to be until we went to live in the Philippines. There we found that most people tend to put relationships above goals. A core value for most Filipinos is "Smooth Interpersonal Relationships (SIR)." It took me a while to get my head around this. When we started living in Asibanglan and learning Kalinga, a previously unwritten language, we set up an office where I could focus on the work of learning and analyzing the language. People would frequently stop by the office to visit - an interruption for me in my "work." One day a wise Kalinga friend observed that I was going about things all wrong. He suggested that the way to learn their language was not to sit in my office pouring over my notes and texts, but by going out and interacting with the people of the village. I knew I still had to do the former, but I tried to take his advice and do more of the latter. We were still pretty goal oriented because we had a job to do. Our primary assignment, the translation of Scripture, finally got done in spite of many interruptions and I think we learned something about SIR along the way. Then a couple of years ago I was at a conference where an Asian was invited to speak to a gathering made up of mostly western missionaries. He urged us westerners to get past our preoccupation with our goals and engage in some "inefficient loitering" for a change. Ginny and I hope to do a bit of that when we go to spend a month with our Kalinga "family" in the Philippines in January. I just learned another way of talking about this concept when we went to see "Eat, Pray, Love" last night. "Il dolce far niente" is how they talk about the sweetness of doing nothing in Italian. As I approach birthday #65 I hope to learn about "Il dolce far niente" and enjoy the warmth of being with the people I love more and more.