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 Mason's
Meditations
If
you're looking for something to chew over, some thoughtful seeds
for mental cultivation, bookmark this page for Jeff Mason's fortnightly
meditations. To think in or take away...
Number
Nine: Leisure
There
is more and more leisure time for many people and less and less
leisure. Somewhere along the line, true leisure got confused with
time off from work, time off from chores, time off from the routines
of life. Work is a drag. Time off is fun. However, the usual understanding
of leisure does contain the idea of a lack of time pressure, of
not having to do something right now. We are often so busy that
we forget to grab leisured moments outside socially defined contexts
of spending leisure time.
Leisure
is not about the objective passing of clock time and how much of
it you have to do nothing in particular. True leisure is an approach
or an attitude to the time that you have, whether you are working
or not. It involves slowing down, not rushing or pushing through
time, not letting the clock push you around.
You
can find leisure in the dentist's reception room, the minutes you
are waiting for the checkout line to clear, the 30 seconds you are
put on hold. You can find it gazing at a sunset, walking down the
street, or bending down to tie your shoe. At its heart is a savoring
of the moment, lingering in the present rather than pressing ahead
into the future, or being preoccupied by the past. We cannot always
live this way, of course. There are many situations, often part
of work, that do require thoughts of past and future and involve
timing, attention and concentration. Leisure is good because it
refreshes us for the tasks of a complicated demanding world, but
if all life were leisure, it would get boring. Fortunately, few
of us will ever have to worry about that.
Mason's
Meditations will next be updated on April 1st 2001
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Previous
Meditations
8.
(1st
March 2001)
7.
(15th February 2001)
6.
(1st February 2001)
5. (15th
January 2001)
4. (1st
January 2001)
3.
(15th December 2000)
2.
(1st December 2000)
1. (15th November
2000)
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