HOW ARE YOU AND LEISURE THESE DAYS? Or Why So Many Breakdowns or The Secret Children Have or...

(These thoughts are added to three times each week)

There’s a joke that must be almost as old as Eden. It reads, “My grandmother started walking five miles a day when she was sixty. She’s ninety now and we have no idea where she is.”

The object lesson is priceless. If she was walking toward somewhere to accomplish a particular job, then what she was doing was work. If she was just walking to enjoy the company of Mother Nature, it was leisure. If she was walking to work and enjoying the experience, it was attitude.

There is a new definition that has broken across the horizon. It is called “Weisure.” It describes all the laptops on the beach at vacation time, drivers driving in traffic with cell phones glued to their ears and fathers watching their sons with one eye at little league while with their other eye they are text messaging to a fellow worker.

And now a question. Are you incapable of taking a few hours away from the desk or housework for fishing, or opt for a game of tennis, or work in your garden or to just take a short afternoon nap. Or are you a workaholic and proud of it? Is today’s worker more aware of the calendar than the clock? Has nine to five gone the way of the horse and buggy? Do you chop yourself up in so many pieces that most of the time you can’t find yourself?

As concerned workers in a world that needs our best, we do not have the right to kill time. And I know that for me, one long unending holiday would be pure hell. Pure unadulterated idleness twenty-four hours a day actually can be killing. But I also know that work without respite grinds down the best of us and that many who see themselves as hardworking saints are really weary grouches out of control.

William James wrote, “Neither the nature nor the amount of our work is accountable for the frequency and severity of our breakdowns. But their cause lies, rather in that absurd feeling of hurry and having no time in breathlessness and tension and anxiety.”

Elizabeth Barrett Browning, in The Baretts of Wimpole Street, thoughtfully protested, “What frightens me is that men are content with what is not life at all.”

We, men and women, do not live by excessive labor alone. We live also by sitting quietly before the flickering flame of a campfire, by holding the hand of one we love, by just being alive to grin rather than grind.

William Muldoon, the famous athletic trainer once said, “People do not die of disease, but of internal combustion.” A respite from our daily duties is a good time to get our insides straight mentally, physically, spiritually and emotionally. Leisure lets us freeze frame life’s blur long enough to appreciate it.

A CEO of a large corporation leaves his office several times a week to walk along a nearby river. “I love my work. I just want to keep it that way,” he explains.

In describing children at play, Will Durant once wrote, “What purposes moves these children to their wild activity? What secret desire sustains their energy? None; the play is the thing and these games are their own reward.”

When is the last time you took off your shoes and wiggled them in the mud in a sparkling stream for no other reason than it was there and you wanted to? Can you remember when you traded in the wild-eyed curiosity of a child for the sedate, respectable, sometimes truncated attitudes of an adult?

We certainly have a moral obligation to use well the gift of life, a gift that has been almost doubled in the last 100 years. We also have an obligation not to misuse it. Yes, there are bills to pay but we constantly need to study how many things we now call a necessity that once were a luxury. And at the cost of a closet full of things we have a heart heavy with weariness and worry.

Leisure time? Leisure time is for swapping stories around a campfire; for children and parents getting to know each other better. It is the season for listening, for giving a sympathetic ear to a stranger or a friend. Leisure is the season for giving. It feeds time with a smile because we have not wasted the muscles of opportunity.

Leisure is the time for patience and forgiveness. But patience and forgiveness aren’t easy and when we are bushed it is even more difficult. For then we are more easily angered and less likely to even try to understand. Leisure gives us the chance to bounce back emotionally, physically, spiritually.

Leisure is a time for getting to know yourself. Ask me who in my life has given me the most trouble and I must admit, “Me, when I let myself get too tired and out of sorts.”

If when leisure comes you find you cannot relax because you’re too busy…then you are right, you are too busy.

What I am talking about, of course, is discipline. How much leisure is too much and how little is too little. It is not easy finding a good modus operandi for delegating the hours and minutes of each new day so we do no waste time or allow ourselves to be wasted by time.

Would you find peace in your work or play? Then find a personal Eden: one you can go to that overlooks a mountain or a stream, or one that watches crashing waves, or, as in my case, a back porch where the setting sun turns everything to Kodachrome. I’ve carried a book there often to read and then never read the book. Just sat quietly and watched the turn of the leaves in a soft evening breeze and listened carefully to the song of one bird to the other.

But if some such kind of paradise is not possible, strive to find a calm and restful place within yourself. A little more hush and a little less hustle found by at least some brief slowing down rather than continually speeding up.