Defining Leisure

“I know of nothing which, without exhausting the body, more entirely absorbs the mind. Whatever the worries of the hour or the threats of the future, once the picture has begun to flow along, there is no room for them in the mental screen. They pass into shadow and darkness. All one’s mental light, such as it is, becomes concentrated on the task. Time stands respectfully aside, and it is only after many hesitations that luncheon knocks gruffly at the door.”
-Winston Churchill, Painting as a Pastime

My father-in law likes to cook. Not in the “slow food made fast” sort of way, but the “slow food made really slow,” old-fashioned sort of way. Making dinner is often an all-day affair, sometimes an all-season affair when it includes the plethora of vegetables from the garden.

Take stuffed cabbage, for example. After brewing coffee, his morning begins with a trip to the garden to dig up some choice potatoes beneath their long, shaggy, green shoots. Then, he heads back to the kitchen to scrub, peel, and soak them for a few hours to break down the starches before boiling and mashing them later in the afternoon. Around mid-morning, he’ll pick the cabbage, carefully steaming the whole bundle until the stiff leaves are soft enough to bend, then patiently waits for them to cool so he can stuff large loaves of ground beef and rice into their broad leaves, wrapping and tucking in each one like a toddler in a crib. And after lunch, he’ll select the ripest tomatoes and stew them slowly on the stove top, eventually combining them with the cabbage and beef for a few hours in the Dutch oven.

This is but one of many recipes, many of them Old World eastern European specialties, which are a staple of the diet in the house, particularly around the holidays. And this doesn’t even include the soil preparation, planting, watering and overall maintenance of the garden. He does this kind of cooking day after day, week after week, after long days at work and during relaxing vacations alike, much of it in silence and solitude.

To many, this might seem an astounding use of one’s “free time”. Why not a movie on the couch? Margaritas by the pool? A solid social media scrolling session for an hour or so?

How could this possibly provide rest and rejuvenation when so much “work” is involved? Isn’t our free time supposed to be relaxing?

These questions, typically American, are a result of our complete misunderstanding of leisure and our bi-polar existence in only work and free time. In leisure, these sorts of active hobbies, interests, and passions flourish. In free time, they don’t.

***

The human brain is not a muscle, though most of us treat it like one. In fact, the brain is the most advanced and complex organ in the entire human body, which in and of itself is arguably one of the most complex creations on the planet. It contains around 86 billion neurons which can communicate with each other to form circuits and share information, yet most of us allow the many of those neurons and circuits to go unused, preferring now instead to passively consume mindless digital media during any and every “in-between” moment of our waking hours. Presuming that our brains are “too tired” to function after hours of engagement, which is common with muscles, is quite frankly a myth and much less common with organs. As Arnold Bennett states in his book How to Live on 24 Hours a Day, “one of the chief things which my typical man has to learn is that the mental faculties are capable of continuous hard activity; they do not tire like an arm or a leg. All they want is change – not rest, except in sleep.”[3]

Winston Churchill agreed. In his essay Painting as a Pastime, he describes the many remedies recommended for the “avoidance of worry and mental overstrain” for those of us with stressful jobs, duties, or responsibilities. Exercise, repose, travel and retreat are just some of the ones he mentions, all of them valid in their own right and in the right context. To Churchill, though, the most important element of them all was change.

For Churchill, a man who bore exceptional responsibility on a grand scale for prolonged periods of time, the mind could be genuinely rested and rejuvenated not by rest, but far more effectively and reliably by using other parts of the mind. As he states clearly, “a new field of interest must be illuminated…It is only when new cells are called into activity…that relief, repose and refreshment are afforded.”^[1]

And to Churchill, these fields of interest resulted in the development of hobbies (at least two or three of which he recommends “to be really happy and really safe”), which to him were the only reliable antidote to the “convulsive grasp” of worry. To truly combat worry, which he defines as when “the mind catches hold of something and will not let it go,” one must occupy and silence the inner voice in our head with an engaging skill or interest, one which ideally directs “both eye and hand” to be most effective. Otherwise, it is pointless to attempt to convince the mind to abandon worrisome thoughts. As he summarizes later, “the stronger the will, the more futile the task.”

For Churchill, the hobby was painting. And as he describes clearly, the benefits were endless:

Inexpensive independence, a mobile and perennial pleasure apparatus, new mental food and exercise, the old harmonies and symmetries in an entirely different language, an added interest to every common scene, an occupation for every idle hour, an unceasing voyage of entrancing discovery – these are high prizes.^[2]

Though Churchill found these benefits most purely in painting, we can find other active pursuits in which similar mindsets and benefits are achieved. Athletes often describe the “happiness or absence of care so intense, so rare, and so fleeting that we associate the experience with experience otherwise described as religious…shared activities which have no purpose except fully to be themselves.”^[3] In modern terminology, this is often described as being “in the zone,” when the body begins to follow commands which precede thinking and results in a state of “complete coherence and relaxation.”^[4]

And music, when actively listening or more importantly playing and producing, “helps organize the mind that attends to it, and therefore reduces psychic entropy, or the disorder we experience when random information interferes.”^[5]

When freely chosen, these are examples of “coherence without coercion”, of freely assumed activities whose objectives are so solid in and of themselves that for a moment we forget ourselves and our worries altogether.^[6] And forgetting about ourselves, even if only for short pockets of time, seems to be (and always has been) quite satisfying.

In fact, our most meaningful experiences, psychologists have found, are not the passive, mindless ones in front of one of our many digital devices, despite the best efforts of advertisers to tell us otherwise. More often than not, “the best moments occur when a person’s body or mind is stretched to its limits in a voluntary effort to accomplish something difficult and worthwhile.”^[7]

The characteristics of “optimal experience” and “flow”, which are really just modern versions of ancient leisure, are most often very active experiences or activities which involve one or more of the following characteristics:

• Tasks we have a chance of completing
• Tasks which allow us to fully concentrate on what we are doing
• Tasks with clear goals and immediate feedback
• Tasks which allow us to exercise a sense of control over our actions
• Tasks in which our sense of time is altered: hours can feel like minutes, and minutes can feel like hours^[8]

These sorts of activities bring us the most meaning and value, though they run counter to what our advertising economy tells us to be “relaxing”. And even if they require a great deal of energy or time to complete, we find ourselves returning to them again and again.

Which brings us back to my father-in-law and his preparations for dinner.

Preparing the soil, nourishing the seedlings, watering when dry, repairing the trellis, harvesting the crop, brining the meat, chopping the vegetables, simmering the broth – to many Americans, these activities might be considered the antithesis of relaxation, as they embody “work”, “toil”, “labor”, and “exertion”, which, according to the most up-to-date American dictionary, are in fact antonyms of our modern definition of leisure.

But things like gardening and cooking provide my father-in-law with all of the attributes of the optimal experience, or flow: he is capable of finishing the recipe by dinner time; he can fully concentrate on preparing the ingredients and temporarily forget about the stock market and pandemic; taste, texture, color, and praise provide immediate feedback; there are rarely any other humans involved to get in the way of preparing the meal; and losing track of time, though sometimes harmful to the end product (dinner time), is a wonderful benefit of the process (preparing the meal).

True leisure, true noble leisure, is in fact not a passive outcome of “nothing to do” or boredom, but an active product of choice, and one of the purest outcomes of our most prized possession, freedom. When we choose to squander this freedom with passive, mindless, or sometimes slothful digital consumption, we are also squandering the opportunity and capacity to use leisure rightly, which, according to Aristotle, is the basis of a free man’s life.^[9]

If most Americans are repulsed by the idea of active, challenging, and freely chosen pursuits outside of work, we are either working too much or need a new understanding and definition of leisure. These essays intend to explore both hypotheses.

1. Churchill, Winston. Painting as a Pastime. 1932 ↑
2. Churchill, Winston. Painting as a Pastime. 1932 ↑
3. Giamatti, A. Bartlett. Take Time for Paradise. Pg 19. ↑
4. Giamatti, A. Bartlett. Take Time for Paradise. Pg 41 ↑
5. Csikszentmihalyi, Mihaly. Flow. Pg. 109. ↑
6. Giamatti, A. Bartlett. Take Time for Paradise. Pg. 23. ↑
7. Csikszentmihalyi, Mihaly. Flow.↑
8. Csikszentmihalyi, Mihaly. Flow.↑
9. de Grazia, Sebastian.  Of Time, Work and Leisure. pg. 14 ↑