On Leisure
The rhythm of leisure is elusive and I feel constantly that I’ve got it wrong. Zen has this contradiction, too, between advocating a kind of naturalness about the activities of the day and then imposing a schedule on it that no human would adhere to naturally. The workweek has aspects of this, made worse by commuting. I used to get up at 6 a.m. to hit the train at 7 a.m., before the crush, and then work until 7 p.m. to avoid the crush home, but this 12-hour regime was defeated by the steady stretching out of the rush “hour,” especially in the evening. I was so glad to stop.
What is leisure’s rhythm? Does it even have one, or do the different strands of leisure have their own, like the tuning of instruments to whatever key things will be on a given day? I suspect the latter, and that what’s missing for me is a bit of deliberation about the time ahead, asking what it asks of me, to be used fruitfully. For time is fecund and fecundity has a rhythm of its own. Less of an ear than a nose for this — or an eye, an attentiveness.
And this is an important point, that fecundity shifts from the species to life itself. The Buddha’s comment that the grass, too, shared what he grasped at last, the essential sameness of every transient thing in this universal boat, possibly an accordion that hits entropy’s limit and then takes a really deep breath. Opening out to this other kind weakens the hold of our species’ telos. Life’s fecundity is the distillation of this other thing, a homeopathic.
“Death is the great question,” according to some Zen adept I read once, but in fact there’s no question. The rhythms of leisure reflect how it, too, takes hold, a second, unavoidable telos. We do what we can while we can. As we’re told most of our lives to think of the future, its foreshortening is unnerving. No strategy earns us a pardon. Buddha’s ladder, as I think of it, is to savor whatever leisure life affords us, whatever savoring is still possible.
I would say that life is the great question. Death doesn’t really need answers. Equanimity without terror is what’s wanted, death being the end of every story. I so admired a friend for making jokes before dying in his sleep. Life is the great question, and leisure is like an extended minor, as against a career-long major in working for others. But we’ve been pursuing it our whole lives, particularly as children. We know quite well how to work for ourselves.
