The Art of Doing Very Little

On empty days, long mornings and the quiet pleasure of having nowhere in particular to be.

There is a particular kind of ambition that follows us on holiday.

We arrive somewhere new and immediately begin filling the days. A walk before breakfast. A village before lunch. Perhaps a mountain railway, a restaurant we have read about, somewhere we have been told we really ought to see.

The mountains have a way of making all of this feel rather unnecessary.

Some of our favourite days in the Bernese Oberland are the ones for which nothing has been planned. They begin slowly. A window is opened. Coffee is made. Breakfast lasts longer than expected. The newspaper remains folded on the table because the view outside has become more interesting.

And, for a while, nobody asks what comes next.

The Luxury of an Empty Day

An empty day can feel strangely unfamiliar.

We have become very good at filling time. Even rest has acquired an agenda: places to visit, restaurants to try, kilometres to walk, things to experience.

But there is something quietly liberating about waking without a plan.

Perhaps you walk down to the village for bread. Perhaps you follow a path simply because you have never taken it before. Perhaps the clouds arrive and you decide not to go anywhere at all.

Mountain weather is particularly good at dismantling plans. A clear morning can disappear behind clouds before lunch. Rain moves through the valley. The temperature drops. Then, almost without warning, the mountains return.

Living here teaches you not to mind too much.

Walk when the sun appears. Stay inside when the rain comes. Read for an hour. Make another coffee. Leave for somewhere at four in the afternoon simply because the light has changed.

There is considerable freedom in allowing the day to decide.

Take the Long Way

Slowing down does not necessarily mean staying still.

Sometimes it means walking rather than driving. Taking the train for no particular reason. Stopping in a village you have passed many times before. Sitting outside a bakery with something still warm from the oven.

The Bernese Oberland rewards this kind of curiosity.

Away from the better-known destinations are farm roads, old timber houses, small workshops, mountain restaurants and paths that disappear into the landscape. Often the pleasure is not in arriving anywhere remarkable, but in noticing what sits between one place and the next.

A stack of firewood arranged with almost unreasonable precision. Geraniums beneath the windows of a farmhouse. A handwritten sign beside a refrigerator selling cheese. The sound of water somewhere below a path. A bench positioned in precisely the place you would have chosen yourself.

None of it requires a reservation.

There is almost always another way home.

Take it.

The Pleasure of Staying Put

And then there are days when even the long way home feels unnecessarily ambitious.

Haus Mannenberg has stood here for more than three centuries. It was built for ordinary life rather than entertainment, and perhaps that is why it feels particularly suited to days when very little happens.

Doors remain open to the garden. People move between the kitchen and terrace. A book migrates from one chair to another without much being read. Someone disappears upstairs for an afternoon sleep.

Coffee becomes lunch. Lunch becomes the question of what to make for dinner.

The hours pass almost unnoticed.

There is no sense that one should be somewhere else.

For us, this is one of the great pleasures of a house in the mountains. It does not always need to be the starting point for an adventure.

Sometimes it can simply be the destination.

Nothing Much Happened

By evening, an apparently empty day has usually become surprisingly full.

There may have been a walk. A swim. A conversation that lasted longer than intended. Something bought from a farm along the road. Dinner made together. The last of the daylight watched from outside.

Or perhaps very little happened at all.

That is fine too.

We have never believed that travelling somewhere beautiful creates an obligation to experience all of it. The mountains will still be there tomorrow. The path can wait. So can the restaurant, the cable car and the village on the other side of the valley.

Sometimes it is enough simply to be where you are.

And perhaps one of the great pleasures of the mountains is remembering that a day does not have to be filled in order to have been well spent.