For the workaholics amongst us, leisure time may well be one of the thorniest challenges around. How to use those hours or days off, those times when nothing in particular is scheduled, without transforming leisure into productivity or, assuming we have succeeded in unproductivity, without falling into the slough of guilt? Behind every workaholic stands a virtual Puritan, after all, goading and driving one forward, ever onward, meeting every fleeting moment of sloth with a vigorous wagging of a finger or a beady-eyed glare.
I’m not particularly good at leisure. I suspect that I don’t like it very much. Never having been interested in the sporting life, I am hardly about to find renewal in a brisk game of tennis or a few laps in the pool. Nor am I particularly prone to pleasantly useless hobbies, such as collecting things or making things or obsessing after some scrap of information. I have my passions, to be sure, but they are for the most part exercised in the daily task of making a living, given that I’m blessed to do professionally what I would do anyway as a matter of course. Provided I have enough energy to breathe and walk around, I’m more than happy to teach, make music, play music, study music, and the like. I don’t need to be building the Queen Mary in my basement as a valve to let off steam from career frustration.
Which might mean that I have trouble with the concept of “time off” because I don’t need time off.