Leisure

Philosopher Josef Pieper describes leisure:

“…Leisure is the condition of considering things in a celebrating spirit.  The inner joyfulness of the person who is celebrating belongs to the very core of what we mean by leisure…Leisure is only possible in the assumption that man is not only in harmony with himself (whereas idleness is rooted in the denial of this harmony), but also that he is in agreement with the world and its meaning.  Leisure lives on affirmation.  It is not the same as the absence of activity; it is not the same thing as quiet, or even as an inner quiet.  It is rather like the stillness in the conversation of lovers, which is fed by their oneness.  In Holderlin’s poetic fragment, die Musse are found the following three verses: “I stand in a peaceful meadow / as a beloved Elm tree, and as vines and bunches of grapes, / the sweet play of life coils around me.”  And as it is written in the Scriptures, God saw, when “he rested from all the works that He had made” that everything was good, very good (Genesis 1:31), just so the leisure of man includes within itself a celebratory, approving, lingering gaze of the inner eye on the reality of creation.” (Leisure the Basis of Culture 33)

As Pieper describes it, true leisure is not idleness, nor is it quietness, and yet it does resemble a kind of stillness.  This is something we struggle to grasp.  Perhaps a good place to begin is with where Pieper says that leisure is only possible not only when “man is in harmony with himself” but when “he is in agreement with the world and its meaning.”  We might ask, “what does the world mean?”  What does it mean that there is a world?  What is the significance of food, water, trees, people, dirt, sky?  What communication do these things give about themselves?  Then we might be able to answer what it means to live in agreement with such a world as this.