We've lost leisure...

You jolted out of bed this morning to the clang of your alarm. Phone in hand, you stumble to the kitchen to brew coffee. Groggily you scroll through the emails you have already received since last night. Much to your chagrin, your boss messaged you at 4 am with an urgent request.

You glance at the watch permanently affixed to your wrist and realize that it’s already 6:07 am. This problem can’t wait. You spring to action: coffee goes into a travel mug, you hustle to get dressed and brush your teeth, work bag in hand you leave your apartment in a flurry. You had just enough bandwidth to remember your drink on the way out the door.

photo from Wix media library

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Sound familiar?

Likely, you've been fed the lie that you work for the sake of work. Because without work: you won’t have the means to live, your purpose will be muddied, your identity will shatter.

We have become so fascinated with productivity that there is nary room to be human. To allow our minds to breath, to rest, to embrace leisure.

Through our affixation on efficiency and productivity, we no longer understand what it means to be human.

Constantly, we are grasping for immediate gratification, searching for meaning, and longing for purpose. Instead of being rooted in our own identity and how we fit into the fabric of society, we have become trapped in getting things done. Numbing our minds with work. Numbing our hearts with entertainment.

However, there’s an escape route from this dire situation. There’s hope to reclaim what’s missing: leisure.

The concept of leisure has become so abstracted from our everyday vocabularies, that redefinition is necessary to proceed.

“Leisure…is a mental and spiritual attitude – it is not simply the result of spare time, a holiday, a weekend or a vacation. It is, in the first place, an attitude of mind, a condition of the soul and as such utterly contrary to the ideal of…work as activity, as toil, as a social function.” – Josef Pieper (Leisure the Basis of Culture)

Leisure is not an activity we do to be better equipped to work, but something we delight in for its own sake. Just because it restores our souls. In essence, leisure does not exist for the sake of work, but work for the sake of leisure.

Growing in your ability to leisure will not be simple. It is no small feat to break habits and ties to old ways.

However, there is a place to begin.

That’s what I’ll be dissecting. Stay tuned for more musings on what leisure is, how to practice it according to philosophers, and what activities will lead to mastering the art of leisure.

My goal: understand more fully what is means to truly live as human through the lens of leisure.

Let’s begin.