On True Leisure
Howdy!
And happy Saturday. I don't have any exciting intro banter, so let's not discuss this and just move on to the content, shall we?
Watch Out: This Man Has Thoughts On Leisure But Hasn't Read A Lick of Pieper!
Bad news, folks: that man is me! It's your old pal Hunter and he has takes again. I'm sure they're not unique but I wanted to write them out. Onto the goods.
For the past tens of thousands of years, chaos has reigned upon this world: I do not, given our current climate, suspect we're due for a change anytime soon. In that light, I presume we're all trying to adapt from "oh, maybe this will be over at the end of the summer" to "oh, this is my life now". Reckoning is rarely fun, and such is my experience. That leads me to an attempt to try and reframe my life as much as I can to stay a) sane and b) faithfully Catholic.
In this sense, I've been drawn to leisure. If I could convince myself to read anything of value more than an hour every two weeks, I'd be taking my best shot at Pieper's Leisure: The Basis of Culture. Unfortunately, none of that, but fortunately: I have read many posts and listened to multiple podcasts about it!
Here's the quick and dirty that I've gleaned: leisure is good. It's not necessarily productive in the efficiency sense, but it does involve some degree of active effort, I think. Common examples that I keep hearing are engaging in personal (as in not for work) learning, reading, spending quality time with others. I don't know that they all fit in a certain category or have anything in common. My best guess at a theme is that these are things you finish doing and you have a really nice, satisfied feeling after. The "I can sleep well, this was a complete and fulfilling day" feeling. I've definitely spent my day on dumb things (making spreadsheets work so my budget auto-updates when my paycheck hits) and gotten the same feeling. But I don't think you can really have leisure without the knowledge of fulfillment, if not the feeling itself.
My thesis, then, is that all these things involve meaningful human interaction: if not in the immediate, as part of the larger fulfillment. Some of these are obvious: for me at least, few things make me happier than an evening with friends doing literally anything. I think even the activities that begin solitary (reading, learning, uh....other things) roll up to one of two ends: the betterment of one's knowledge/self or spiritual growth (prayer, presumably different other things). Even in these cases, we know that faith and knowledge both would be limited ends in themselves if not shared with others. Is the a-ha moment of learning something new not made manifold when shared with others? Do breakthroughs in your spiritual life not make you want to share that joy with others?
So therein lies the kicker: in a life that is ultimately about leisure, our ability to bring that leisure to its fullness--for ourselves or others--is capped for the foreseeable future. (I'm willing to entertain the possibility that this is an extrovert-induced issue, but not even introverts are able to live the fullness of faith on their own!)
I think there's a conversation to be had about levels of acceptable risk (backyard hangouts, well-sanitized areas, small groups that agree to be safe and only hang with each other, etc). I also....never want to hear about these things again. There was a running refrain from people on our side of the internet at the beginning of this time that the pandemic/lockdown combo would produce saints. I don't doubt that some people are rediscovering their prayer life, or their desire for something more. I just don't think it's that straightforward.
As is often (read: always) the case here, I'm not doing journalism, and I don't have a conclusion. I'm just positing that perhaps those wise Israelites in the desert didn't have something click after a couple years and they were holy from there on out. Perhaps the point of suffering is not to suffer efficiently, or with an eye toward what you can learn from the experience, but to wait it out as best you can. Perhaps this whole newsletter is me reminding myself of these things! That's writing, baby.
Anyway, I apologize for not writing more often. It's just that I didn't want to. I hope you all are doing well, or at any rate, keeping things together in some sense.
In Christ,
Hunter "working in sweatsuits, exclusively" Lastname
P.S. Working on a big new content project soon. It's not newsletters, but I'll ping you all through this service once the first part of it drops. Suffice it to say, if you like hearing from me every so often, you'll enjoy it (I hope!).