Leisure

Admittedly, I would rather have passed it over and gone on to something else. But, of course, I can’t. When someone comments to me that “I long for your life of leisure,” I pause. They are completely entitled to their feeling, of course, and it probably comes from a place and has a very different meaning than I think, but it gets my back up.

You see, I used to wish I was/had someone/something else. Our whole society is built around these kinds of wishes. All societies are. Those desires, and their repression or sudden release (usually in an orgy of death), is society (thank you, Freud). That comment was society.

Why? Well for the best reason of all — judgment. We make basic judgments in perception all the time (“Umm…I think it’s too far to jump across that puddle…”). But what is “basic” and what is “perception”? Suddenly the whole idea of judging takes on a complex air when the net is cast wider. It’s “human nature”, we say…Everybody does it. A cornerstone of modern selfhood, this kind of judgment. And bourgeois, too (as in fairly universal and seemingly innocuous). Even people raised by wolves can figure it out…

That’s fine, but why do it out of context (in both senses of the word)? You see this blog, a snippet, and it appears “leisurely.” Does that constitute a life of leisure? Besides, what is leisure? I once remember pouring through somebody’s reader for a class on the “history of leisure,” and like so many other things, found it to be, unsurprisingly, largely socially constructed. Ancient Greeks and late 19th century Victorians, for example, differed widely on the idea. It’s not a static concept.

But it has a value, and to me that value is high. Maybe it’s high because I am a lot of the time…Whatever…Makes me see things at odd angles…Peering into the negative space a little. This doesn’t always feel so leisurely…

I’ve come to the increasing realization that it really (and I mean truly) doesn’t matter what people think. I used to care…Quite earnestly and with deep repressive impulses, about this thing we call “society.” But my experiences have been too aharmonious, too incongruous, to believe all that much in all of it. I shouldn’t have done what I did in life, I probably shouldn’t be here (but where else would you be, they’d all say?), but I am. If that means that I walk and sit on the beach and write and ruminate, then so much the better.

I’m not a rat and I don’t race. And if I did, you’d lose anyway…