But What Now?

Active leisure is a concept I recently learned about from Ernie Zelinski in his book The Joy of Not Working: A Book for the Retired, Unemployed and Overworked- 21st Century Edition. I view leisure differently now. My daily power walk is active leisure. Reading a book on the beach is active leisure. I guess some people might say that watching television is active leisure, but I would consider that passive. I haven’t regularly watched television for nearly 15 years now and when I did I found that it sucked up time. After getting rid of the TV, I’ve never had any need to have one around to keep boredom away. But that’s me, I didn’t like the noise it made in my home.

As I was walking this afternoon, I thought alot about this concept of active leisure. I do my best to bring a meditative quality to my walking. I’m definitely not doing walking meditations, but I am consciously bringing my thoughts back to the here and now when I notice that they’ve drifted off to thinking about work or something else going on in my life. I always feel better when I do that. I think that is an important part of active leisure, in other words, creating a calm place of renewal in our lives.

Renewal can mean many different things. Here’s where taking a class would be considered active leisure. For instance, I’m looking forward to taking a Photoshop class soon. When I was younger and unemployed I took college classes. It got me out of the house and into a community of like minded people. I enjoyed the stimulation, I did it because I enjoyed it.

So, active leisure is also about enjoyment, about doing something we choose to do rather than something we feel we have to do to earn money. It’s a huge distinction.