Free Time
True free time is time that is free from the exigencies of work and the requirement to play. In true free time the highest things are offered. Remember that before filling your weekends with incessant activities and your weekdays with twelve hours of work. And if you find yourself suddenly bored, don't recoil in fear. Be brave and face it and see what comes.
Leisure "is being neglected in a degree which seems to me to threaten the degeneration of the whole race. It's because artists do not practice, patrons do not patronize, crowds do not assemble to worship reverently the great work of Doing Nothing, that the world has lost its philosophy and even failed to invent a new religion." G.K. Chesterton
"As more and more people seem to recognize, the universal experience of being bored -- unengaged, detached, afloat in some private torpor -- may be far more precious, fruitful and even profound than a surface apprehension might suggest. As ordinary as gray skies and equally pervasive, boredom deserves its own sun-splashed attention and celebration. . . . When San Francisco choreographer Brenda Way, the artistic director of ODC, finds herself in a sluggish lane of traffic, she often stays put. The 'unfocused, unintentional' time of feeling bored, she believes, opens her up to the 'unconscious scanning that's the very stuff of problem solving and creativity.' Joe Rosa, the Helen Hilton Raiser Curator of Architecture and Design at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, regards boredom as a 'luxury.' Most of the planning for his upcoming SFMOMA show on design post-World War II to the present, "Glamour: Fabricating Affluence," was conceived in the long, eventless hours of airplane trips. . . 'Boredom is paradise,' exults the poet Billy Collins. It's 'the blessed absence of what the world offers as "interesting," i.e. , the lures of fashion, media and other people, which, you may recall, Sartre considered Hell.'" Steven Winn, writing in April 2, 2004 issue of the San Fransisco Chronicle
"Only the person who is still can hear, and whoever is not still, cannot hear." “Just as in the realm of the Good, the greatest virtue is without difficulty, so in knowing, the highest form would be the lightening-like insight, true contemplation, which comes to one like a gift; it's effortless and not burdensome.” Josef Pieper
