There is more and more leisure time for
many people and less and less leisure. Somewhere along the line, true leisure
got confused with time off from work, time off from chores, time off from the
routines of life. Work is a drag. Time off is fun. However, the usual
understanding of leisure does contain the idea of a lack of time pressure, of
not having to do something right now. We are often so busy that we forget to
grab leisured moments outside socially defined contexts of spending leisure
time.
Leisure is not about the objective passing
of clock time and how much of it you have to do nothing in particular. True
leisure is an approach or an attitude to the time that you have, whether you
are working or not. It involves slowing down, not rushing or pushing through
time, not letting the clock push you around.
You can find leisure in the dentist's
reception room, the minutes you are waiting for the checkout line to clear, the
30 seconds you are put on hold. You can find it gazing at a sunset, walking
down the street, or bending down to tie your shoe. At its heart is a savoring
of the moment, lingering in the present rather than pressing ahead into the
future, or being preoccupied by the past. We cannot always live this way, of
course. There are many situations, often part of work, that do require thoughts
of past and future and involve timing, attention and concentration. Leisure is
good because it refreshes us for the tasks of a complicated demanding world,
but if all life were leisure, it would get boring. Fortunately, few of us will
ever have to worry about that.
No comments:
Post a Comment