Moodling is one of those human activities that one doesn’t hear much about. Rarely does a friend come up and say, "Wow, what a great moodling session I’ve had today!" Moodling isn’t offered at any colleges or universities, and moodling groups are unknown. That’s because moodling is mainly a solitary activity. Oddly enough, some of the world’s greatest people have been topflight moodlers—folks like Isaac Newton, Napoleon, Albert Einstein and George Bernard Shaw.

What, you ask, is moodling?

Moodling is doing not much of anything—or, to put it better, it’s the art of doing nothing. Soaking in a bathtub is moodling. So is scuffling your feet through the leaves on a fall day when you’re just out for a stroll. Or lying under a tree on a summer afternoon and watching the clouds pass overhead.

You can moodle best when there are no nagging worries to distract you. You can’t moodle very well when you’re driving, for example, because other cars keep interrupting the wayward flow of your thoughts. No, the best environment for moodling is one that offers no obstacles to daydreaming. The point of moodling is not to be doing anything in particular. Moodling is its own reward.

Well, actually, there can be other rewards, but you can’t have them by trying to get them. You have to moodle for its own sake and simply hope that the other rewards come your way. I’ll give you an example.

One day in 1666, as the story goes, Isaac Newton was moodling under an apple tree in Woolsthorpe, England. Why, he puzzled, didn’t the moon obey the principle of centrifugal force and fly off into space? Just then an apple plunked on him or near him (it doesn’t matter which), and this accomplished moodler was perceptive enough to grasp its importance. The falling of an apple was the answer to his question.

The apple simply fell. Newton simply moodled. Unlike millions of people who had experienced the same thing, however, Newton made connection. Voilá! His resulting theory of the gravitational attraction of heavenly bodies, published in 1687, stood until it was challenged in 1905 by Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity.

Moodling doesn’t necessarily produce great ideas. Sometimes you just moodle. But if you never moodle, you miss something very important. You miss out on the time for reflection that so often precedes the lightning flash of an important insight or new idea.

As a writer, editor and book designer, I go to my office and I work on pieces of paper. I push them around, mail them to people and read the ones people mail to me. But the office is rarely where I get my ideas. I dream up most of my book cover designs and article ideas while soaking in the bathtub or sitting at a concert or drifting off to sleep. Those are the times we are creative, I think, so naturally we owe it to ourselves and to the universe to make sure we have plenty of moodling time available.

The word moodling comes from Brenda Ueland, who wrote about its importance for those who want to encourage their creativity as writers. In her book If You Want to Write (1938), she explains that if they are to be good, artists must dare to be idle:

Our idea that we must always be energetic and active is all wrong. Bernard Shaw says that it is not true that Napoleon was always snapping out decisions to a dozen aids-de-camp, as we are told, but that he moodled around for months. Of course he did. And that is why those smart, energetic, do-it-now, pushing people often say: "I am not creative." They are, but they should be idle, limp and alone for much of the time, as lazy men fishing on a levee, and quietly looking and thinking . . .

We might call moodling "constructive idleness." This quiet looking and thinking opens the imagination; we encourage ideas to come to us by being available and receptive. "So you see," Brenda Ueland concludes, "the imagination needs moodling—long, inefficient, happy idling, dawdling and puttering."

This is the essence of leisure, wouldn’t you agree? And the term moodling describes it perfectly.
There is even a payoff for those who keep an eye on productivity: "What you write today," says Brenda Ueland, "is the result of some span of idling yesterday, some fairly long period of protection from talking and busyness."

What a wonderful realization! Not only is moodling enjoyable in itself, but it gives us a return in increased creativity—better ideas, whether we translate them into writing, art, music, inventions or business decisions.

So I’m learning to moodle more these days. I used to feel a bit guilty about lolling in the bathtub or reading quietly. Now when I soak happily I can smile with double satisfaction. I’m neither wasting time nor missing opportunities. No, I’m doing something vitally constructive—I’m moodling!

David Robinson is a book author and book producer. He is the former editor of Creating Excellence magazine and was a mentor of SuccessNet's founder Michael Angier. David lives in New Hampshire with his wife Felicia and son William.