Summer is vacation time for many and for some it is the time they work the hardest. In any case, leisure needs to be part of our lives. When we consider leisure we are considering a relationship to time. There is a quality of timelessness when we truly enter leisure. Feeling, even for a day, that we have all the time in the world creates a chemical change in our bodies. Our nervous systems get a taste of eternity.
Phrases posted on Facebook, August 2018
To me leisure has a kind of rhythm to it. I once watched a man scythe a field by hand in Vermont. There was such beauty in the way the blade rose and fell with no hurry but with no stopping either. The man was clearly at leisure and yet working–a paradox that didn’t wear him out. I could tell he was enjoying the way the grass fell around him as he worked, the field itself, the sunshine and his own being with it all.
There is a difference between just eating and dining. I want to call the difference leisure. When we dine we are not feeding the hungry wolf inside that would scarf until stuffed. We are instead savoring and being nourished by every bite and the entire experience of being at table.
Any time we let our souls catch up with our bodies we are in leisure. That may be an entire day or a moment of infused quiet.
When simply going is as important as getting there, we can obey the speed limit and take in the journey. An internal speed limit would not be bad to have while doing whatever we might be doing. It’s a paradox that limits open other dimensions, and there leisure might lie in wait for us with a welcoming smile.
So much draws our attention both from within and from without. Over stimulated we are fried. We can see that stress in small children who have been given too much of anything. The truth is that the little kid is still there inside us. I like to ask mine what would feel like enough today because I know keeping to a moderate, thoughtful limit promotes relaxation–an essential ingredient of leisure
Have you noticed how hothouse flowers look great for a little while and then keel over almost at once? They are not given the leisure to develop in a natural way. How many of us are in the metaphorical hothouse cranked up to produce in un-natural ways with unwelcome outcomes?
Here is a Finnish aphorism–God did not create rush. Taking the time to allow things to reveal themselves as they truly are is living in leisure.
My deceased partner, Stanley, would always take a resting pause between each thing he was doing. I would watch him stop for stopping’s sake. Because he cultivated leisure in this way he could get more done than most people.
Summer time and the living is easy, for some of us. For others it is the most pressing of work times. It’s good to be aware that a great deal of our leisure may be possible because others are working hard. And to be fair, it is the other way around, too. In our families the sharing of the load so that everyone can have a bit of leisure is much needed.
Sleep in mornings . . . how we love them. We’ve taken have to out of the picture for a few hours. Still, the want to inside us loves to be awake. Then time is laced with leisure and possibility instead of resentment and resistance.
When we push beyond our limits for too long, the result almost always is a dead stop for recuperation that is not leisure. I think the feeling of leisure happens when we align with the body’s rhythm and respect it. Then, whether we are at work or at play, we have a good relationship with time, with what is happening around us and also inside us.
We have a day of possible leisure on Labor Day. Leisure and labor . . . I love the paradox of putting those two words together. This is a poignant time because summer is over for a lot of us once Labor Day rolls around. Could we possibly live summer days throughout the year . . . feel time expand, let ourselves be slower, exchange the urgency of doing for some gentler way of being? Surely we’d feel summer sunshine pouring into us then.
It’s the last day in August and a last post on leisure. In pretend leisure we want to stop the world and be quit of our obligations and usual routines. At the center of true leisure is a trust that all is well, that we live in continual possibilities, and that we can go about our lives in quiet, un-dramatic unfolding and grace.
