How do you view leisure? According to a recent article, most of us living in this fast-paced, productivity-driven world view leisure as either luxury reserved for the privileged or idleness reserved for the lazy—both views infer time away from work and both are non-essential to the everyday man.
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But did you know that some of the most significant human achievements in history originated in moments of so-called leisure? For instance, Galileo invented modern timekeeping after watching a pendulum swing in a cathedral, and Oliver Sacks illuminated music’s incredible effects on the mind while hiking in a Norwegian fjord.
The article goes on to illustrate how distorted our notion of leisure has become, why we are no longer a culture that cultivates or appreciates leisure, but why we should be. The author cites excerpts from the book Leisure, the Basis of Culture by German philosopher Josef Pieper, who wrote the book in 1948, a year after the word “workaholic” was coined in Canada.
Pieper explains that the Greek word for “leisure,” σχoλη, produced the Latin scola, which in turn gave us the English school—meaning that our institutions of learning were once intended as a mecca of “leisure.”
He argues that leisure is not necessarily time away from work, but rather that leisure can be found in work. He writes:
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.
Leisure stands in a perpendicular position with respect to the working process… 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 in our sense is not justified by providing bodily renewal or even mental refreshment to lend new vigor to further work… Nobody who wants leisure merely for the sake of “refreshment” will experience its authentic fruit, the deep refreshment that comes from a deep sleep.
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Pieper also argues that to reclaim this higher purpose of leisure is to reclaim our very humanity:
Leisure is not justified in making the functionary as “trouble-free” in operation as possible, with minimum “downtime,” but rather in keeping the functionary human … and this means that the human being does not disappear into the parceled-out world of his limited work-a-day function, but instead remains capable of taking in the world as a whole, and thereby to realize himself as a being who is oriented toward the whole of existence.
This is why the ability to be “at leisure” is one of the basic powers of the human soul. Like the gift of contemplative self-immersion in Being, and the ability to uplift one’s spirits in festivity, the power to be at leisure is the power to step beyond the working world and win contact with those superhuman, life-giving forces that can send us, renewed and alive again, into the busy world of work…
In leisure … the truly human is rescued and preserved precisely because the area of the “just human” is left behind… [But] the condition of utmost exertion is more easily to be realized than the condition of relaxation and detachment, even though the latter is effortless: this is the paradox that reigns over the attainment of leisure, which is at once a human and super-human condition.
If we can take anything from the wisdom of a 20th Century German philosopher, it should be that we should strive to make more time for leisure—unfettered by work-time and schedules—so that we can slow down and live life exactly how it unfolds.
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Curated article from Brain Pickings
