The Positive Education of Leisure

Henry Zylstra said that “Contemplation represents not an escape from drudgery into entertainment, but the positive education of leisure.”

Robert Louis Stevenson wrote of people who deny themselves time for contemplation: “They have dwarfed and narrowed their soul by a life of all work, until here they are at forty with a listless attention, a mind vacant of all material for amusement, and not one thought to rub against another while waiting for the train.”

Enter the mid-life crisis.  With no internal playland, a man seeks to satisfy himself with external pleasures.  With no life of the mind, man compensates with an over-active life of pursuing pleasure to break the boredom of a life so full yet unfilled and unfulfilling.  It is one of the great undiagnosed diseases of our culture.