A day free from labor

is not the same as a day of leisure, to continue the point below (“The importance of leisure.”) Because we fill the time off work from the job with other activity, or work at home (clean the garage, the basement, pay bills, try to catch up with writing deadlines…)

That’s why I found Josef Pieper’s “Leisure: The Basis of Culture” so refreshing and enlightening. He teaches what the early Greeks knew, the leisure is a spiritual matter of the soul. It’s different from “the break” that refreshes us for more work.

Now leisure is not there for the sake of work, no matter how much new strength the one who resumes working may gain from it…Leisure is of a higher rank.

We hardly even understand the concept anymore.

Pieper asks some good questions. Like 

“will it ever be possible to keep, or reclaim, some room for leisure from the forces of the total world of work? And this would mean not merely a little portion of rest on Sunday, but rather a whole “preserve” of true, unconfined humanity: a space of freedom, of true learning, of attunement to the world-as-a-whole? In other words, will it be possible to keep the human being from becoming a complete functionary, or “worker?”

In America, we’re close to that now.

I found this great bookmark holding a page heavily highlighted in this book, and suppose I put it there a long time ago, though I enjoy it even more now. It has a quote attributed to Jerome K. Jerome 1859-1927. Under a sketch of a fly-fisherman about to cast his rod in mid-stream, is this thought:

It is impossible to enjoy idling thoroughly unless one has plenty of work to do.

Take the time to be idle, enjoy it thoroughly, and don’t worry about all that work you have to do. I’ll try to do the same.