Rediscovering the Beautiful Art of Hanging Out

Hanging out, it’s something I’ve relearned in my retirement. As kids, we used to do it all the
time because, that’s all we seemed to have, was time. Then, if we went to post-secondary,
we’d can still hang out but not for such lengthy periods of time. We’d have scheduled our
hanging out time to sit on the benches in the hallway near the entrance to the library,
coffee in hand, and watch the other students pass by. Usually, we scheduled hanging out
with a friend or friends but sometimes alone.

Occasionally, someone else might come along and hang out with you and you might learn
some amazing things about that person like they’d been a chamber maid in London and how
gross that had been but also, how interesting. Or, you might discuss a book you’ve been
reading or a problem you’ve been attempting to solve. Or, some philosophy you’ve
discovered that has opened your eyes to a brand new world. Or, some cockamamie theory
you’ve come up with that you think will open the eyes of others.

I was always thinking I’d come up with that. I wanted to be the next Kierkegaard or Jean-
Paul Sartre or Heidegger. These are the kinds of crazy thoughts I had in my youth and I
would share my ideas with those I was hanging out with. And they’d think I was crazy.
I remember asking a friend, why we have words because I’d been reading about Zen and no-
thought which was a little like existentialism, living in the moment and I’d been thinking
about how words tend to mess us up and he replied, “How else are we going to order beer
tonight?” which was what we were about to do because we were on our way up to the
University bar called “RAT” or Room at the Top where we’d hang out some more and drink
Lethbridge Pil and count the rabbits on the label or Molson Export which if you turned the
bottle upside down made the sailing ship on the label look like an armadillo. And we’d eat
Cheezies, the Canadian kind that crunchie made with extruded corn oil and cheddar cheese.

That was hanging out. And then, we graduate and lose that sense of having a lot of time and
hanging out seems like a waste of that precious time because there’s always so many other
important to be accomplished like mow the lawn or weed the garden or shovel the snow or
prepare a case or a lesson or professional reading to better your expertise and hopefully, as
well, your monetary value. And with those expectations, you also need time to exercise and
spend time with the family which usually doesn’t include hanging out because there’s piano
lessons and soccer practice and hockey and dance and the kids hanging out with their
friends.

You might wonder why I’m thinking of this now. Well, it’s not my idea. It’s the idea of a
Sheila Liming who wrote a book called “Hanging Out – The Radical Power of Killing Time.” I
read the sample sent to me by Amazon and from the sample, Ms. Liming did provide me
with an insight that I didn’t gain just by reading the title and that is, wasting time is a form of
empowerment because, by wasting time, you’ve taken control of time by making it your

own to waste.

And the hanging out cannot include any activity in front of a screen unless that screen
envelopes the image of a friend or family and it’s not being minimized so that another
project or game or purchase can be made at the same time. It can only include hanging out
with that other person or persons. And there can be dead spaces, where no one’s talking,
making possible a change of topic or a topic of concern or interest of that other person
because it’s a matter of being in the moment with that other person, not worrying about
what else you can be doing or where else you could be.

And at the end of the hanging out, you can say you’ve gotten to know your friend or family

member or just some dude or dudette or other a little better with no other objective in
mind that to hang out, let the conversation go where it may or may not without any
underlying goal in mind.

Just to hanging out. Anyway, I just thought I’d share that with you and, if you’d like to hang
out with me, that would be great. If not, that would be okay too.