The Soul of Leisure

“Go! Go! Go!” My son lay atop his red plastic kayak, coiled in anticipation. At his triumphant command, his older brother grabbed the free end of the rope and began running as quickly as he could. The makeshift sled accelerated down the icy incline, carried on by shouts of joy. Our wildest dreams had come true—a freak snowstorm had dropped inches of ice and snow across North Florida. We were sledding in the impossible.  

We rose early to a frosty fairyland, resolved to enjoy every second, sure it would be gone by lunch. Yet the shade of the live oak canopy and plummeting evening temperatures kept roads icy and impassable (at least for Floridians). For days schools and businesses were shuttered, and in this miracle, I found three nearly perfect days of leisure. 

Leisure has been my white whale since I first read Josef Pieper’s Leisure: The Basis of Culture a decade ago. You see, I couldn’t seem to understand it, not really. I could write about it, talk about it, teach about it. Though I could explain it, I hadn’t known it poetically, through experience. I experience plenty of things that seem like leisure. I go on vacation, but leisure is not a vacation. I sit on the back porch each Sunday afternoon, but leisure is “not a Sunday afternoon idyll.”[1] Sometimes I do nothing, but leisure isn’t that either. I sit and watch television, but that is often the opposite of leisure. Leisure is not found in our circumstances; it is a condition of the soul.  

Leisure is an inner stillness, not something one can arrange. If I had believed in a winter miracle, I would have tried to manage everything so I could enjoy it: clean the house, prepare food, and get things done. As it was, the house was not clean, tasks lay unfinished, and everyone still wanted to eat dinner. Nonetheless, when grace fell from the sky, planning didn’t matter. There was nothing to do but receive. 

Receptivity is the soul of leisure. Josef Pieper writes that leisure implies “an attitude of non-activity, of inward calm, of silence; it means not being ‘busy’, but letting things happen.”[2]  I can’t think of anything that would make me quite so receptive to this as snow accumulation in Florida. It will never happen again; I would be a fool not to open my hands, to accept and enjoy. Thus, I set aside our schoolwork and my writing projects, and we went outside. The mode of our play shifted throughout the days with the quality of the snow—now wet, now icy. It was our job to submit to the moment, and in doing so, I experienced some of the most joy-filled moments of my adult life. 

Somehow, for a few days, that mode of receptivity extended beyond playing outdoors and to my work in the home. As I did the necessary minimum to keep the household running, it seemed different somehow, more like a gift than a task. Each time I happened to glance out the window the snow was a shock, jolting me awake. The strange wonder of it did not fade. There was a lightness of being, and the few chores that I did do felt not like toil but like a different sort of play. For a few holy days, the wonder of it all unveiled reality to me. 

One might argue that freak snow days in Florida are not reality. But this is to misunderstand what reality is. Reality is a meaning-filled cosmos created through and sustained by the Word. Work did not become toil until man’s disobedience in the Garden. To point to the consequences of the Fall as reality—laboring over dusty baseboards, for instance—is to see backward. The moments when the veil is thin, when we see clearly, are when we truly apprehend reality. Thus, Dante’s journey is a climb so that he might no longer be blind. 

Today is the sort of day where blindness is easy. It is a regular day in February—sweaty too soon, a thick coating of pollen emptying me of coherent thought. Nonetheless, I sit at my homeschool table beginning another trip around the horn into the wilds of multiplication with my youngest child. Where is that quality of the soul now?  

Like most things, I expect it is found in repentance and obedience. Pieper identifies acedia, one of the seven deadly sins, as the root of both idleness and incapacity for leisure (such as workaholism). Swinging between these two forms of leisurelessness is a familiar pattern: I’m too busy to take a break until I’m exhausted; once exhausted, I’m too tired for leisure. Turning from acedia means turning toward its contrary: man’s “happy and cheerful affirmation of his own being, his acquiescence in the world and in God—which is to say love.”[3] Obedience unfolds from a heart made of hospitable ground. Wendell Berry expresses it perfectly: “We live the given life, and not the planned.”[4] A hospitable heart takes what is given, embeds it in fertile soil, and allows it to grow. This is what gives us the soul of leisure: taking the given, releasing the planned. 

[1] Josef Pieper, “Leisure: The Basis of Culture,” including “The Philosophical Act,” trans. Alexander Dru (Ignatius Press, 2009), 53.

[2] Pieper, Leisure, 46. 

[3] Pieper, Leisure, 45.

[4]  Wendell Berry, “I think of Gloucester, blind, led through the world,” in A Timbered Choir: The Sabbath Poems, 1979–1997 (Counterpoint, 1998), 178.