More Time for Leisure
It will be six months ago on Wednesday that I defended my dissertation. My time commitments have certainly changed since completing my academic program. You would think I would find more time for leisure now, but that has only somewhat been the case. For the purposes of clarity, I don’t mean leisure as in recharging and just doing whatever I want for fun (although I do a good deal of that and certainly don’t believe that is wrong). Rather, I mean leisure in the sense that Josef Pieper defined it, “For leisure is a receptive attitude of mind, a contemplative attitude, and it is not only the occasion but also the capacity for steeping oneself in the whole of creation.” He goes on to explain that, “Leisure, it must be remembered, is not a Sunday afternoon idyll, but the preserve of freedom, of education and culture, and of that undiminished humanity which views the world as a whole.” I have more time than ever to try to explore what it looks like to view the world as a whole and to explore where ever I want to, yet I still struggle with fully embracing this concept.
I think part of this struggle is because of the fragmentation of our world. I have been reading Beauty for Truth’s Sake by Stratford Caldecott with some friends, and one key point from that book is that our world has become obsessed with compartmentalization. We make everything into a specialization and then we fail to see the world for the whole that it is. In other words, we are being countercultural when we strive for the leisure that Pieper believes we should have.
I am tempted to think that some pursuits are unimportant. I pressure myself to read nonfiction, for example, because I think that I need to continually be learning facts about our world. However, then I remind myself of the lesson that I tried to teach my students every week as we read The Lord of the Rings. I told them that these stories, although fictional, can teach them a lot about their lives and our world. That is leisure. In pursuing the wholeness of our world, even fantastical stories can help us achieve that goal. We build up these false barriers in our minds about what is useful in the pursuit of leisure and what is not, but in reality, the things that will help us in that pursuit are much more diverse then at least I am tempted to think sometimes.
Rod Dreher recently released Live Not by Lies, and he chronicles many stories about people who lived under the communist regimes in Eastern Europe. One family he features is the Benda family who lived in Prague in what was Czechoslovakia. Philip Benda recalls how his mother read them The Lord of the Rings at least six times. When asked why she did this, he explained, “She also taught us that the imagination was something that was wholly ours, that could not be stolen from us. Which was also something that differentiated us from others.” Fantasy helped them understand their reality. This is part of wholeness. We sometimes diminish the importance of certain things because we are sold the lie of practicality. If we are truly going to live lives of leisure, we can’t write off parts of creation. Instead, we need to dive into them wholeheartedly.
It is not just fiction and fantasy that are of concern here. Now that I find myself with more free time, I am trying to actively seek ways in which I can broaden my view of creation. As Pieper often says, leisure should be effortless, like a festival which he considered the epitome of leisure. I’m not quite to that point yet either. Some things are still an effort while I would love to be able to say I find joy in learning about all parts of creation all the time. These past six months have been great, and I think I have found more time for leisure. Hopefully the next six months will find me even further down this path.