The Culture of Idleness and The Civilization of Leisure
What is human being doing in her or his leisure? To capture the meaning of leisure, I will fabricate an illustration simply.
One afternoon, one, when going home after working, turned left to look in a park in the middle of his town. There he was drinking some ice tea while smoking his cigarette. His job all the day hurled him into the unending exhausted day. He now entered into his throng mind, attempting alleviating his pain and agony, striving envisioning a great condition in which he would not be chased by a collection of tasks rendering him cheesed off and surfeited.
What was on his mind, he wanted to go abroad someday, doing something novel, making his own gladden job. He had never thought about it before. At that time, at the homely park, he did it. He found a way to take himself wander into another dimension which was impossible to do if he had not had leisure to turn left drinking the ice tea and envisioning his futuristic overview.
What the guy did at the park was his existential activity at his leisure. He brought all of himself fully to participate in deciding what would be happening. Certainly, from outside we judge him as a fancier, a day-dreamer who was only quixotic since the day after he would do the same things he had been doing repeatedly.
That is not my point. What I mean is, that leisure is the time of the self to measure the possible upcoming time. The guy exactly celebrated his leisure with a right way. He was able to withdraw from the hurly-burly of his world to embroider his other possible realities. If he had not had his leisure at the park, he would not have dived into his other landscapes.
Oftentimes leisure is used to glorify laziness. The mass people who do it do not comprehend that leisure is their treasure. The more often they have leisure, the more they have the treasure. It is undeniable that people in the world are made busy executing everything without exception with the result that they do not have their authentic leisure. We consider leisure a place for our idleness. Actually, it is indeed yes. Conversely, the idleness does not render us really lazy in a useless activity, but it triggers us to functionalize it maximally.
In our leisure, we build civilization, at least for our own civilization. In this exact meaning, we praise idleness. A priest or a cleric cannot read many books to study theology if (s)he does not have leisure. All artists, scientists, and inventors do likewise. They truly need leisure as their treasure in order to set the civilization move along. We, consequently, can appraise that their idleness is the pillar of our civilization.
After the guy spent his leisure envisioning the upcoming time by drinking his ice tea and smoking some of his cigarettes, he drove his car towards his home. Although the day after still going to work in the same company where he worked before, he would somehow take his steps with shouldering his own new civilization.[]