wayneholland.org

 

A LIFE OF LEISURE

July 12, 2004

 

For the longest time, I couldn't figure out what I wanted to do. It took decades for me to finally realize that I wanted nothing more than to be a man of leisure. It seems like the consummate goal. How could it be any better? A person of leisure has the power to do whatever they want whenever they want. It's that simple.

But whenever I bring this up in conversation, I usually get for a response something like, "Dude, that's impossible. You'd have to be rich or something."

An objection like this clearly belies a total misunderstanding of what it truly means to be a person of leisure.

You see, it doesn't necessarily mean that you're rich. That of course could facilitate it, but it is not an absolute requirement. As a matter of fact, it could actually get in the way.

It might very well mean, though, that you could not be married. A rich person with a spouse could still have difficulty with having leisure (unless the spouse were extremely accommodating).

It would also—most definitely—mean that you could not have a job, at least a job working for someone else. You might indeed work if you were blessed with a life of leisure, but you could never be in the position of an employee under someone else's supervision. The very idea is completely antithetical to the basic idea of leisure.

What it's really about is time. A person with plenty of leisure at their disposal has command of their time, and once that happens, you'd be surprised at what it does to your headset. Our culture seems to prod us to fill our time with all sorts of crap (have you sampled the garbage on television lately?). If we were in full command of our time, we would think more about what we wanted to do with it. And in nine cases out of ten we would do as Thoreau suggested: we would simplify. The clutter, you see, gets in your way, which means it takes away from your leisure. If you regarded the leisure as sacred (which you would if you had it), you would not let that happen. Being rich suggests that you at least have the power to have a lot of stuff, but a man of leisure in all probability would not want such a thing. It would get in the way of his leisure. As Buckminster Fuller once put it, we are responsible for everything we own. And responsibility is another thing the man of leisure avoids, like the proverbial plague.

A man of leisure would be obsessed, as it were, with quality. Sensitive of his precious time (all that we really have in life), which is the very essence of leisure, he would carefully ponder the consequences of his actions (and possessions), choosing only those which would enhance the quality of that time, make it rich with texture and fulfillment, thereby making his life feel truly complete, and be so without trinkets, gadgets, baubles and toys, but with order, organization and control, all of which are forms of power. It is only by wielding this kind of strength that we may realize the greatest contentment, that commodity we usually refer to as peace of mind.