Leisure, or free time, is time spent away from business, work, and domestic chores. It also excludes time spent on necessary activities such as sleeping and, where it is compulsory, education.
—Wikipedia
How much leisure do you have in your life? How do you spend it? How much on focused activities and how much just doing a bit here, a bit there? A few days ago in One Thing Leads to Another Mike commented,
Have I ever made a seemingly small change and had it lead to much bigger ones?
Sure… and the original small change gets buried or never gets done. More often than not, when I go to make a change of any kind, I get distracted from what I intended to do and only get back to it days — or longer — later.
Yay, Mike! You’re a kindred spirit. If I get immersed in a project I can focus on it for days. But otherwise I’ll pick something up, get distracted, start something new for a bit, etc. I no longer worry about it, especially when it comes to reading. I love books and buy more than I can possibly read. I used to feel guilty about it, but now I feel rich. If I feel like reading I’ll see what appeals to me and read for only as long as I want. Then I’ll put it down and go on to something else. What could be more luxurious than that?
What about you? Is your leisure more orderly than mine?
My leisure time is spent wandering around admiring what I got done & deciding what (of a million jobs) I want to do next. I do enjoy my jobs though. I still do a lot of hiking which I love but biking took up lots of leisure time earlier.
Opps, Wikipedia says domestic chores aren’t leisure time.
I watch TV. We have two flat screen 42 inch HD TVs. BUT I sit on my feet with legs folded under to be more flexible (arthritis) which isn’t so fun. At least not at first.
The main thing is you enjoy your life. I’m clearly a lot lazier than you are!
Lazy is fun too.
As tammy and I can assure you, a lot of tasks don’t have to be done. Presumably that means some domestic chores count as leisure if you choose to do them?
i dearly love being lazy. i never allowed myself to even really enjoy my weekends while working. i always had errands or chores … cleaning… laundry… etc… that HAD to be done before Monday. or at least i ‘thought’ they did.
i’m easier on myself now. if it doesn’t get done today it will be done tomorrow.
life is getting shorter. and i’m not about to waste it wondering if i should run the vaccum! LOL.
i’m a happy lazy leisurely person! i can bury myself now in a book for days!!!
Yay, tammy! I was always the lazy one in my family because I liked to read. It bothered me until I had a great swimming teacher once. She taught us to relax and trust the water. “Swimming is a lazy sport! If you’re working too hard, you’re doing it wrong.” I figured that goes for life, too. That doesn’t mean bikehikebabe isn’t doing things right — as long as she’s doing it because she wants to and gets pleasure out of it.
Manfred Max-Neef a development economists lists idleness as a human need (smart man).
Agreed! One of my favorite quotes is by Brenda Ueland:
I like Brenda’s thinking.
I don’t have leisure — I have projects. 😉
Do you have any choice about your projects? Andy has a lot of projects, too — like planting, watering, fertilizing, spraying, etc. his fruit trees. Does he need to try to grow fruit trees at a 9000 ft elevation? It’s a hard argument to make. 😉
And I didn’t have to spend several days modifying my new theme. But I wanted to. I’ve just noticed that the photo credits don’t work the way they did in my old theme, and I need to figure that out. If I want to. The world won’t come to a halt if I don’t.
Your projects are probably more sensible than ours, so they may qualify as non-leisure. How would you classify blogging? It’s an interesting question.
Generally, I do have choices in my “projects” and they usually are things that I enjoy doing, so technically, they probably qualify as leisure. Building a new dining room, my current major project, just doesn’t seem like leisure when I wake up in the middle of the night stiff and sore.
I keep busy and I don’t generally equate being busy with leisure.
Working on my blogs can be very tiring as I have several ongoing themed projects on Exit78 and I’m preposting diaries, letters and other material in my civil war blog — http://http://dotcw.com/ — to stay ahead of the corresponding day 150 years ago — I already have nearly 14,000 posts there and the “end” of the war is still over a year and a half away.
Wow! Your Civil War project is a major commitment. Thanks for giving me the link to it — I had lost it and was going to ask for it. At the moment I’m listening to 1864: Lincoln at the Gates of History. As far as I can tell, the war wouldn’t have lasted nearly so long if the all the good generals hadn’t been Confederate.
Thanks to your comment, tomorrow’s post (with any luck) will be about projects and happiness.
I think my whole life of recent years is one of leisure…
But I only just realised that a few weeks ago 🙂
Yes, I’m getting an education but the end-purpose is “nothing” and Yes, I am working on becoming a mixed media artist which currently is related to papercrafts and recycling but it’s still leisure…fun as well.
The other thing in my life, that I’ve put the rest of this year aside for is not exactly leisure but it is being done at a “leisurely pace” – some days I wish I could get it all done this week but then I remember I put 6 months aside to do it leisurely 🙂 🙂
It makes a big difference if we’re doing it because we want to, doesn’t it? And that we don’t have to rush. It makes all the difference.
I am on permanent leisure time!
Yes!!