This is a good one.

Polish freedom fighter and Nobel Laureate Lech Walesa said, "I'm lazy. But it's the lazy people who invented the wheel and the bicycle because they didn't like walking or carrying things." It's one of my favorite quotes, partly because it is perverse and unexpected in its subject and message, and partly because I'm lazy, too. I like to hear that my laziness is a positive quality, that it serves as the motivation -- as the driving force, even, because the world is built on irony -- behind great achievements, or at least worthy and memorable things.

I want, very much, to say this is true. It doesn't seem like it can be -- my first thought is that the people who took the time to invent the bicycle, which probably included quite a bit of trial and error and a whole lot of falling on one's booty, couldn't really be called lazy. Maybe the ones who dreamed up the bike were lazy, but they weren't really the inventors. But maybe I'm misunderstanding. Maybe it would help if we examined the guy who said it.

It seems pretty clear from a shallow reading of Lech Walesa's CV (If you don't know what that means, look it up, ya lazy twerp) that he was not, despite what he said, a lazy man. He was an electrician in Communist Poland in the late 1960's, who got a job in a shipyard and started a family. But then he got involved with the movement to create free trade unions, to give the workers a means of protecting themselves and fighting for a better life, against the will of the oppressive government. Over the course of the next twenty years, Walesa rose to national and then international prominence as the leader behind the movement, which became known as Solidarity. He was blacklisted, jailed several times, exiled, and everything else that comes with struggling against a tyrant.

And he won. Walesa and Solidarity managed to get the government to allow limited unionization, and then forced them, with a country-wide general strike, to enter into negotiations with unions, which led to the first democratic election in Poland since it became a Communist bloc country after World War II. Walesa convinced several political leaders to join forces and form a non-Communist coalition government, which they did.

That's right. He overthrew Communism. He led his country to freedom. Poland was the first Communist country to overthrow Communism, and it happened because of this "lazy" man. He won a Nobel Peace Prize in 1983 (he donated the million-dollar prize to Solidarity) and then served as Poland's President from 1990 to 1995. He has since retired, though it has been an uneasy retirement, as he has tried to continue guiding his country, both as a candidate and as a party leader. He is no longer quite so popular, as his own presidency was fairly controversial and the Polish people bear some resentment for his unwillingness to turn into a parade-going, baby-kissing Living Legend; it 's hard to keep a cherished nostalgia about a man who's standing right in front of you and yelling about politics.

But how can we see Lech Walesa as a lazy man? Come on: he fought against his entire goverment. He lost his job early on, but he kept fighting for the rights of his former co-workers. When the general strike was coming on, he actually scaled an enormous wall around a shipyard so that he could join up with striking shipbuilders. Even after he won his fight, he didn't stop; he took on what was probably the hardest job in the country, becoming the first non-Communist president, the guy who has to make a broken country work (Sort of like whoever gets to take over from W. [Cheap shot at unpopular president: check.]). And then he refuses to go quietly into that good night: he is still politically active now, fifteen years later, despite that being unpopular. Oh yeah: and he and his wife of 40 years have eight kids. And this guy is supposed to be lazy?

That's not the definition of lazy that I grew up with. As I understood it, being lazy meant: laying on the couch and watching TV for an entire weekend, while ignoring the overgrown lawn, the overflowing trashcan, and the parade of failing grades that will be marching by like cackling homunculi of stupidity on the fast-approaching report card. That's lazy -- and that ain't Lech.

But the man said it, himself. He's lazy. Unless there's a translation problem (Unlikely -- how could you screw up "lazy?") or he's just too stupid to understand what the word means (Even more unlikely, because, well, duh.) or he has absolutely no ability to look objectively at his own life (Possible, since he was clearly more idealistic than pragmatic -- but then again, you can't win a fight against an entire system of government without being a realist) then there has to be a way to understand laziness as representing a life like Walesa's, and therefore making this quote, at least potentially, true.

If you see laziness as the desire for a peaceful life, for a life of rest and contemplation, of quiet pursuits and comfort and solidity, then it works. Then you can believe that your desire for that tranquil, retiring life, one without great excitement (read: conflict, danger, competition) or character-building challenges (Those would be, "Incredibly difficult things that make you want to cry, but afterwards you can tell yourself that you're a better person because of it." Like recovering from painful injuries.) could be the source of your accomplishments. Then it works. Then Walesa makes sense, because what he means by "laziness" is the preference for rest over labor, for peace over conflict, for home over adventure. This is a trait that one can possess, and still be willing and able to do the work to bring that about -- even if the work necessarily includes fighting for twenty years to overthrow your own government.

This is the laziness I have. It is not the laziness that most of my students have, or most of my countrymen. Most of the lazy Americans have the sort of laziness which makes us put off until tomorrow everything that doesn't have to be done today -- not the kind of laziness that makes us do the work today so we can relax tomorrow. Both are lazy, because a non-lazy person, an active and ambitious person, is the type that will do as much as possible today so that he can do even bigger and better things tomorrow, and so on ad infinitum; it's like seeing your entire life as a buildup of momentum, as a constant acceleration without any top speed. Until the end of the race, of course. When you hit the wall.

Can anybody tell me why you want to be moving as fast as humanly possible when you hit that wall? Wouldn't that just, you know, hurt more?

The other kind of laziness, the one that wants to put everything off until tomorrow -- and then when tomorrow comes, puts everything off again -- that is not the kind of laziness that Walesa was speaking of. It is not the kind of laziness that can lead to positive results. It is not the kind of laziness that can even make you happy, because all you ever end up doing is compromising your own values: you want to get the lawn mowed, but then you tell yourself that watching the baseball game is more important. You want to get good grades, but somehow you manage to believe that having fun is more meaningful, somehow. You tell yourself lies, and you tell everyone around you even bigger lies, in order to gain -- what?

What is the advantage of that kind of laziness? All that happens when you put off your problems is you get even bigger problems. Everybody knows this, because all of us have dealt with it at one time or another. This is what leads to the compromises, and the lies -- and the self-loathing that, in my opinion, comes from being a truly lazy person in an active world, although said self-loathing may be tacit or even subconscious -- because you end up trying to escape or rationalize the large problems, and you do it by finally dealing with the small problems and telling yourself that makes it all right. Look at my lazy students: they put off doing any homework or studying for six weeks at a time, telling themselves all along that it will be fine, that nothing bad will happen -- or at least that finishing this level is more important than the homework, that this party is a better idea than studying. Then after they receive their gloriously bad report cards, they come to me and ask to make up work. I give them a list of missing assignments, and they do one. Maybe two. Just enough to satisfy angry parents, and their own consciences (However much of that they have -- I'm thinking that cricketus jiminius should go on the endangered species list.) but not nearly enough to raise their grade. Because that would take actual effort, and the lazy person is never willing to put out actual effort when another route exists -- even when that other route leads to bigger problems. Like failing out of high school completely. Or, even worse (though they don't think so, of course), graduating from high school without having learned anything. And the worst problem of all: trying to go through your entire life being lazy, avoiding problems today, and pretending, despite ample evidence to the contrary, that ignoring those problems today makes the problems less, that somehow this procrastinatory paradigm doesn't snowball all of your problems until you are buried under an avalanche of mountains made from molehills.

Like credit card debt.

Now that I think about it, I am going to say that Walesa did use the wrong word in his quote. He shouldn't have said he was lazy: he should have said he was boring. I tell my students all the time that I'm boring, that I have no life, that I don't like nor crave excitement. It's why I don't do extreme things, why I don't try to push the envelope and go bigger and faster and harder than everyone else. It's also why I'm happy, but that's irrelevant. The point is that I, like Walesa, want a quiet life. A boring life. And I, like Walesa, am willing to do what it takes to accomplish that. That means I'm not actually lazy, since I do my work (though reluctantly) and I do my duty. And then I relax, and go about my boring day, my slow life, with my simple, quiet pleasures, the kinds of things I'll never be able to brag about because nobody will be impressed by the amount of time I spend reading a book, or the number of deliriously pleasant hours I have spent in my hammock in the back yard, while my grass grows tall and wild underneath me and my undisciplined heathen of a dog (He'll sit. If you give him a treat. Sometimes.) wanders around sniffing everything and occasionally stopping to lick my hand lovingly. Nobody wants to hear about that.

Alas.