leisure
[adding page while swimming in Maria‘s work.. in particular for this.. on Pieper. obviously resonating esp in regard to work ethic ness and earn a living ness and luxury ness and as the day ness.. for art\ists, aka: all of us]
Leisure, or free time, is time spent away from business, work, domestic chores and education. It also excludes time spent on necessary activities such as eating and sleeping.
whoa. how is that leisure. really liking Maria’s term below: retox – assuming you will resume.. not leisure.. partial freedom is no freedom..
The distinction between leisure and unavoidable activities is not a rigidly defined one, e.g. people sometimes do work-oriented tasks for pleasure as well as for long-term utility. A distinction may also be drawn between free time and leisure. For example, Situationist International maintains that free time is illusory and rarely free; economic and social forces appropriate free time from the individual and sell it back to them as the commodity known as “leisure”. Certainly most people’s leisure activities are not a completely free choice, and may be constrained by social pressures, e.g. people may be coerced into spending time gardening by the need to keep up with the standard of neighbouring gardens.
or kids in organized sports, or … long list… spinach or rock ness
A related concept is that of social leisure, which involves leisurely activities in a social settings, such as extracurricular activities, e.g. sports, clubs. Another related concept is that of family leisure.
yeah. not likely leisure..
Leisure studies and sociology of leisure are the academic disciplines concerned with the study and analysis of leisure.
academic disciplines… studying.. (quoted below) something that can’t be defined/grasped… rather perhaps must be lived/emerged/grokked.. swam in..
[..]
Time available for leisure varies from one society to the next, although anthropologists have found that hunter-gatherers tend to have significantly more leisure time than people in more complex societies. As a result, band societies such as theShoshone of the Great Basin came across as extraordinarily lazy to European colonialists.
Workaholics are those who work compulsively at the expense of other activities. They prefer to work rather than spend time socializing and engaging in other leisure activities.
perhaps (prefer..?) because, ie: spinach or rock ness, they are only offered a pkg deal.. not free to think for themselves .. to do the thing they can’t not do.. something else ness…
Men generally have more leisure time than women. In Europe and the United States, grown up men usually have between one and nine hours more leisure time than women do each week.
funny how we think we can measure everything..
______
crazy. defn graphic above and wikipedia page.. which often has ie: greek meaning.. seems to miss the essence we crave ….(or simply define a word differently.. which is fine.. but our obsession with the day is perhaps.. most marred by this offbeat defn.. no?)
quotes below from Maria’s post [just go there – take a swim]:
https://www.brainpickings.org/2015/08/10/leisure-the-basis-of-culture-josef-pieper/
In 1948, only a year after the word “workaholic” was coined in Canada and a year before an American career counselor issued the first concentrated countercultural clarion call for rethinking work, the German philosopher Josef Pieper (May 4, 1904–November 6, 1997) penned Leisure, the Basis of Culture (public library) — a magnificent manifesto for reclaiming human dignity in a culture of compulsive workaholism, triply timely today, in an age when we have commodified our aliveness so much as to mistake making a living for having a life.
The Greek word for “leisure,” σχoλη, produced the Latin scola, which in turn gave us the English school — our institutions of learning, presently preparation for a lifetime of industrialized conformity, were once intended as a mecca of “leisure” and contemplative activity.
re de fine school.. as equity (everyone getting a go everyday) as the day. or perhaps as this suggests.. go back to an original definition… but make it for all of us.. won’t work w/o all of us..
originally (by this defn anyway) a place where people are freed up to study/be their art.. turned into a place where people are measured as to how well they are doing/learning what others think they should be doing/learning.. and then valued only by that measure
[..]
What is normal is work, and the normal day is the working day. But the question is this: can the world of man be exhausted in being “the working world”? Can the human being be satisfied with being a functionary, a “worker”? Can human existence be fulfilled in being exclusively a work-a-day existence? – JP
[..]
The code of life in the High Middle Ages [held] that..
it was precisely lack of leisure, an inability to be at leisure, that went together with idleness;
..that the restlessness of work-for-work’s-sake arose from nothing other than idleness. There is a curious connection in the fact that the restlessness of a self-destructive work-fanaticism should take its rise from the absence of a will to accomplish something.
[…]
Idleness, for the older code of behavior, meant especially this: that the human being had given up on the very responsibility that comes with his dignity… The metaphysical-theological concept of idleness means, then, that man finally does not agree with his own existence; that behind all his energetic activity, he is not at one with himself; that, as the Middle Ages expressed it, sadness has seized him in the face of the divine Goodness that lives within him.
[..]
The opposite of acedia is not the industrious spirit of the daily effort to make a living, but rather the cheerful affirmation by man of his own existence, of the world as a whole, and of God — of Love, that is, from which arises that special freshness of action, which would never be confused by anyone [who has] any experience with the narrow activity of the “workaholic.”
[…]
Leisure, then, is a condition of the soul — (and we must firmly keep this assumption, since leisure is not necessarily present in all the external things like “breaks,” “time off,” “weekend,” “vacation,” and so on — it is a condition of the soul) — leisure is precisely the counterpoise to the image for the “worker.”
[..]
Against the exclusiveness of the paradigm of work as activity … there is leisure as “non-activity” — an inner absence of preoccupation, a calm, an ability to let things go, to be quiet.
In a sentiment Pico Iyer would come to echo more than half a century later in his excellent treatise on the art of stillness, Pieper adds:
Leisure is a form of that stillness that is necessary preparation for accepting reality; only the person who is still can hear, and whoever is not still, cannot hear. Such stillness is not mere soundlessness or a dead muteness; it means, rather, that the soul’s power, as real, of responding to the real — a co-respondence, eternally established in nature — has not yet descended into words. Leisure is the disposition of perceptive understanding, of contemplative beholding, and immersion — in the real.
[..]
In leisure, there is … something of the serenity of “not-being-able-to-grasp,” of the recognition of the mysterious character of the world, and the confidence of blind faith, which can let things go as they will.
antifragility, embracing uncertainty, whimsy, wander... as the day… rev of everyday life
[…]
Leisure is not the attitude of the one who intervenes but of the one who opens himself; not of someone who seizes but of one who lets go, who lets himself go, and “go under,” almost as someone who falls asleep must let himself go… The surge of new life that flows out to us when we give ourselves to the contemplation of a blossoming rose, a sleeping child, or of a divine mystery — is this not like the surge of life that comes from deep, dreamless sleep?
[..]
Leisure stands opposed to the exclusiveness of the paradigm of work as social function.
The simple “break” from work — the kind that lasts an hour, or the kind that lasts a week or longer — is part and parcel of daily working life.
package deal ness
It is something that has been built into the whole working process, a part of the schedule. The “break” is there for the sake of work. It is supposed to provide “new strength” for “new work,” as the word “refreshment” indicates: one is refreshed for work through being refreshed from work.
why google 20% is not sustainable.. again to Maria’s retox rather than detox..
Leisure stands in a perpendicular position with respect to the working process… Leisure is not there for the sake of work, no matter how much new strength the one who resumes working may gain from it; leisure in our sense is not justified by providing bodily renewal or even mental refreshment to lend new vigor to further work…
Nobody who wants leisure merely for the sake of “refreshment” will experience its authentic fruit, the deep refreshment that comes from a deep sleep.
To reclaim this higher purpose of leisure, Pieper argues, is to reclaim our very humanity — an understanding all the more urgently needed today, in an era where we speak of vacations as “digital detox” — the implication being that we recuperate from, while also fortifying ourselves for, more zealous digital retox, so to speak, which we are bound to resume upon our return.
This is why the ability to be “at leisure” is one of the basic powers of the human soul. Like the gift of contemplative self-immersion in Being, ….
and the ability to uplift one’s spirits in festivity, the power to be at leisure is the power to step beyond the working world and win contact with those superhuman, life-giving forces that can send us, renewed and alive again, into the busy world of work…
? retox ing here.. no?
and if we’re partial.. we can hear enough.. we’re not quiet enough.. to hear… the rhythm..
self talk as data.. toward eudaimoniative surplus, us, energy..
let’s do this first: free art\ists
_________
more from Maria
https://www.brainpickings.org/2016/05/30/george-eliot-adam-bede-leisure/
What will be the good of the conquest of leisure and health, if no one remembers how to use them?” Bertrand Russell asked in his 1926 treatise on human nature and the good life as humanity straddled the gorge between the Industrial Revolution and the Mad Men era of twentieth-century consumerism. A generation later, the obscure German philosopher Josef Pieper made a beautiful case for leisure as the basis of culture — an endangered “condition of the soul” to which we owe just about every great intellectual and creative achievement. That mode of being, once available to shepherds and sheikhs alike, is now under siege from the unrelenting cult of workaholism and productivity that has only grown in ferocity in the decades since Russell and Pieper
[..]
her 1859 debut novel Adam Bede (public library), Mary Ann Evans, better known as George Eliot (November 22, 1819–December 22, 1880), speaks with remarkable prescience to how the modern relinquishing of leisure in the service of anxious productivity is squeezing the essential livingness out of life:
[..]
He was a contemplative, rather stout gentleman, of excellent digestion; of quiet perceptions, undiseased by hypothesis; happy in his inability to know the causes of things, preferring the things themselves.
[..]
[probably repeating some from above below]
www.brainpickings.org/2015/08/10/leisure-the-basis-of-culture-josef-pieper
“Leisure lives on affirmation. It is not the same as the absence of activity … or even as an inner quiet. It is rather like the stillness in the conversation of lovers, which is fed by their oneness.”
[..]
Decades before the great Benedictine monk David Steindl-Rast came to contemplate why we lost leisure and how to reclaim it, Pieper traces the notion of leisure to its ancient roots and illustrates how astonishingly distorted, even inverted, its original meaning has become over time: The Greek word for “leisure,” σχoλη, produced the Latin scola, which in turn gave us the English school — our institutions of learning, presently preparation for a lifetime of industrialized conformity, were once intended as a mecca of “leisure” and contemplative activity. Pieper writes:
The original meaning of the concept of “leisure” has practically been forgotten in today’s leisure-less culture of “total work”: in order to win our way to a real understanding of leisure, we must confront the contradiction that rises from our overemphasis on that world of work.
[…]
The very fact of this difference, of our inability to recover the original meaning of “leisure,” will strike us all the more when we realize how extensively the opposing idea of “work” has invaded and taken over the whole realm of human action and of human existence as a whole.
Pieper traces the origin of the paradigm of the “worker” to the Greek Cynic philosopher Antisthenes, a friend of Plato’s and a disciple of Socrates. Being the first to equate effort with goodness and virtue, Pieper argues, he became the original “workaholic”:
_________
Primavera De Filippi (@yaoeo) tweeted at 5:17 AM – 20 Feb 2018 :
“Without the leisure class, mankind would never have emerged from barbarism.” Bertrand Russell’s In Praise of Idleness: https://t.co/RhyKn4MMeV(http://twitter.com/yaoeo/status/965923340425842688?s=17)
I think that there is far too much work done in the world, that immense harm is caused by the belief that work is virtuous,
But in countries which do not enjoy Mediterranean sunshine idleness is more difficult, and a great public propaganda will be required to inaugurate it. I hope that, after reading the following pages, the leaders of the YMCA will start a campaign to induce good young men to do nothing. If so, I shall not have lived in vain.
As long as a man spends his income, he puts just as much bread into people’s mouths in spending as he takes out of other people’s mouths in earning. The real villain, from this point of view, is the man who saves
One of the commonest things to do with savings is to lend them to some Government. In view of the fact that the bulk of the public expenditure of most civilized Governments consists in payment for past wars or preparation for future wars, the man who lends his money to a Government is in the same position as the bad men in Shakespeare who hire murderers.
a great deal of harm is being done in the modern world by belief in the virtuousness of work, and that the road to happiness and prosperity lies in an organized diminution of work.
Work is of two kinds: first, altering the position of matter at or near the earth’s surface relatively to other such matter; second, telling other people to do so. The first kind is unpleasant and ill paid; the second is pleasant and highly paid. The second kind is capable of indefinite extension: there are not only those who give orders, but those who give advice as to what orders should be given. Usually two opposite kinds of advice are given simultaneously by two organized bodies of men; this is called politics. The skill required for this kind of work is not knowledge of the subjects as to which advice is given, but knowledge of the art of persuasive speaking and writing, i.e. of advertising.
The morality of work is the morality of slaves, and the modern world has no need of slavery.
_________
be you. 