Diarist B37
Leisure
This question of leisure time is more complicated than I had at first thought.
I’ve been very fortunate in that I haven’t worked at a typical 9-5 job with a supervisor, lunch break, counting vacation days, and all that, since 1992 when I left my job in publishing in New York City. As a college professor now, I have set class times per semester and related office hours, but other than that I control my time related to my paid job, whether that’s class preparation, grading and assessment, or other tasks.
I say all of this because my leisure time often exists in and around various work tasks; there aren’t sharp lines between work and leisure. When I’m working at home I may do some of that work but then stop and do a leisure activity, then go back to work. It also means that my work “day” doesn’t have predictable hours. I may do work on the evenings and weekends, but that’s almost always by choice. One semester, long ago, I was able to stick to a 9-5 schedule and complete all of my paid work during those hours, but I’ve never repeated the feat. Also, I really love certain aspects of my paid job, and engaging in them almost feels like leisure – it’s engaging and stimulating and fulfilling. So, I don’t really feel that I have a strict line between my paid work and my leisure time. I think that’s a lucky thing, but sometimes I miss the old days where when I walked away from the office I was unable to do any work even if I wanted to, and this was, of course, before email, smartphones, and the internet.
So, that said, there are a couple of major ways I spend my leisure time: drawing/painting and playing the electric guitar. Both of these activities almost seem like “anti-thinking” activities, meaning that I just do them and get into a bit of a flow state enjoying the experience. With the art making there’s the additional joy of seeing the finished product. With the music, it’s rarely recorded so it’s just in that moment and then it’s gone. My college teaching job is intellectual work, so perhaps these two activities meet a different kind of leisure need.
I’m also an American, so I have to reluctantly admit that I spend more of my leisure time than I should shopping or thinking about shopping – almost always for art-related things or, more often, for musical equipment to help me explore other sounds. Sometimes, when I’m tired or I have a certain bee in my bonnet about something, I’ll relax with some online shopping research, watching guitar pedal demos or artists on YouTube.
Finally, I would say that there’s a kind of pre-pandemic leisure and a post-pandemic era kind of leisure for me. One shift in my leisure time that I’m embarrassed to talk about it is the amount of time I spend arranging and organizing my things. I find it engaging yet very relaxing to organize my art supplies or re-arrange my study, moving my desk this way, then that, or experimenting with new configurations of my guitar effects pedals. I’m trying to improve my living space or my space devoted to art and music. I will feel compelled to try a different storage solution, even one I’ve tried many times before, to enhance (whatever that means) an activity. And sometimes, after I’m finished, I see some flaw in the plan and undo it all, often back to the way it was. I didn’t do this as much before 2016 and it’s only gotten worse since the pandemic started. I suspect that this is about control. So many bad things are going on right now in the U.S. and around the world. I can’t control or influence any of it. Perhaps this desire to control my living space is part of a vain attempt to assert some kind of order in a world where it feels like order is disappearing. I think my art-making is a similar attraction – the order of elements into something coherent and beautiful when so much right now is not that way. So this organizing tendency is a post 2016 response to the chaos of the last few years. Sometimes it’s hard to tell whether this is a rational choice, a positive stress-reduction technique or the beginnings on an OCD problem. Time will tell! There’s no harm in what I’m doing, and it’s not interfering with the rest of my life, so for now it’s fine.
So, in response to the question about what I need leisure to do for me, I think I need it to give me space to control disparate elements and make them beautiful, fitting, and proper. I think I’m engaging an ancient idea of bringing beauty into the world in my own way, creating something (a space, a work of art, music) that feels right and good. I like Marx’s idea that all creatures have a “species being”, a particular way of being in the world that is unique to them. And for humans, he says, this is being creative. And, while my paid job allows for (and requires) a lot of creativity, it’s my leisure time where I can really assert this essential part of my species being.