The importance of leisure
If you think you don’t have the time to be idle, read this. There are too many of us out there, and we need to correct our routines.
I have this great book on one of my many bookshelves called Leisure; The Basis of Culture, by Josef Pieper, a great Catholic philosopher and writer. One of the reviews on the back jacket describes the book as an “indictment of the contemporary world,” in which “no charge is meant to be more grave than that it is a world in bondage, a world that has succumbed to the idolatry of work, of activity for its own sake.”
Sounds more right now that when Pieper wrote the book over 50 years ago.
Leisure is not just ‘kicking back’ and taking some time off. It’s profoundly more than that. It’s not just an absence of activity, says Pieper in this masterpiece. Leisure is a stillness of the soul, “an inner absence of preoccupation, a calm, an ability to let things go, to be quiet.”
Are you able to do that? It takes me a little time, though I’m learning to get there better.
“We work in order to be at leisure.”
Guess who said that.
Aristotle. He said that the “pivot” around which everything turns is leisure. Pieper says that the Greeks would probably not have understood our maxims about “work for the sake of work.”
So, in the right order of things, here’s how we should understand leisure.
The simple “break” from work — the kind that lasts an hour, or the kind that lasts a week or longer — is part and parcel of daily working life. It is something that has been built into the whole working process, a part of the schedule. The “Break” is there for the sake of work. It is supposed to provide “new strength” for “new work,” as the word “refreshment” indicates: one is refreshed for work through being refreshed from work.
How does that compare with your leisure time?
