I once asked a friend whether he was “handy.”

“Unfortunately, yes,” he replied. When a latch broke, or a faucet didn’t work, or a screen door needed replacing, he could never bring himself to hire someone to do the work. He could take care of it. He just didn’t want to.

I am not handy. Though I have fixed a few things around the house – a leaky toilet here, a burned-out attic fan there – I have never started one of these projects with professional confidence. YouTube is my constant companion. But once the toilet is replaced and the attic fan humming, my self-worth rises like a chimney: through the roof.

The difference between me and my friend isn’t just that he’s handy and I’m not. It’s more fundamental. For him, do-it-yourself projects are chores. He needs to do them and wishes he didn’t. For me, the same projects are fun. An hour spent wrestling with the bolt on the bottom of a toilet tank is, for this liberal arts graduate, time well spent.

This raises the question: What exactly is leisure and why is it important?

To understand what leisure is, we must first distinguish between two kinds of activity.

First, there is work we do for the sake of what the work produces. We might call this kind of activity “labor” or “toil.” The faster we get it done, the better. If my friend could snap his fingers and fix his hot water heater, he would. Most of the tools invented by human beings throughout history are “labor-saving devices” that make this kind of work easier. We want to get the job done; we don’t care how.

We often think that the opposite of labor is lying on the couch with our thumbs on our phones. But labor’s opposite is actually another kind of activity, something we do not for the sake of getting it done, but for the sake of doing it.

A middle-aged man who gets up at 5 a.m. on a Saturday to bike 20 miles works hard, but not for the sake of getting the work done. He bikes for the sake of biking. If he didn’t enjoy it for its own sake, he would stop. This kind of activity – one that affirms and celebrates the world – is what we call “leisure.”

In many ways, the difference between labor and leisure is a state of mind. When the worker only cares about the outcome, he views the work as labor. When the worker cares about the work itself and has no desire to “hurry it along,” he views it as leisure. A vegetable farmer might wish his tomatoes grew instantly so he could sell them faster. Efficiency is uppermost in his mind. But an amateur gardener doesn’t mind that the tomatoes take their time. He enjoys the process.

My favorite example of this is in “Little House in the Big Woods,” by Laura Ingalls Wilder. Probably everyone who reads this book imagines living in a snug cottage in the forest, whittling spoons and making maple candy out of sugar and snow. Sounds idyllic. But Pa Ingalls, a capable homesteader if ever there was, is always looking for ways to make life easier. When his neighbor lends him a mowing machine, Pa is delighted because it saves him so much valuable time. Harvesting wheat is labor, done for the sake of grain and bread, and what Pa wants is a labor-saving device.

He does not, however, need a labor-saving device to replace his fiddle. He wants to play the fiddle. His family enjoys his music. It is a pleasant way to pass the time on a cold winter evening. I think we can all agree that if the Ingalls family traded Pa’s fiddle for a Spotify subscription and a Bluetooth speaker, they would have lost something valuable.

Our culture does not have a good way to balance labor and leisure. For us, “leisure” often looks like laziness. When we do allow ourselves hobbies, we justify them by claiming that they increase our efficiency. “Yoga helps me focus at work.” “Playing an instrument has been shown to increase intelligence.” The idea of doing an activity just because we enjoy it isn’t totally foreign to us, but we aren’t used to thinking that way.

In his book “Leisure, the Basis of Culture,” philosopher Josef Pieper argues that leisure is necessary to a healthy culture. People who can’t enjoy anything for its own sake, without any thought for what they can get out of it, aren’t spiritually healthy. Human culture depends on our raising our heads above the routines of everyday life and celebrating the world in which we live. If we only ever work with an eye toward efficiency and never toward enjoyment, we might as well be robots, ruthless and analytical.

As a young Walt Whitman put it, “The laboring man has not leisure for true integrity day by day…. He has no time to be anything but a machine.”

We need to learn to take time for leisure.

—

The republication of this article is made possible by The Fred & Rheta Skelton Center for Cultural Renewal. 

Image Credit: Freerange Stock