Programming minds is on the increase. While programming is needed for orderly conduct of work, the habit of programming is encroaching into “programming the leisure”. Leisure is meant to relax, but if leisure is also planned and stuffed with activity on an hourly basis the juice of leisure is lost. Leisure has to be experienced with spontaneity as the underlying factor. Planning it and programming it, is to work on the contrary to the very leisure which mind aspires for.
Modern men have lost the simple technique to relax. The mind tends to lump up scheduled activity even into the bucket of leisure. The fashion of setting leisure in “to-do list” is the paradox of today’s leisurely activity. Consequently the leisure is not enjoyed, while it was planned to be so. The grabbing mind grabs away the leisure and remains as before even after the so-called leisure.
Fear of not accomplishing extend even into the leisure and therefore the leisure is also scheduled back to back. “Free time” no more remains a free time due to the habitual sense of achievement of joy. It is a fallacy if one thinks that leisure has to be productive. Therefore men try to do much more during leisure and enjoy much less the leisure. Completing a novel, hiking the mountains, bicycling the valleys, playing beach basket ball, if planned the leisure is worked out in its opposite direction. There are others who think of car wash, mopping the floors, gardening of the backyard, such an activity dampers the whole idea of leisure. It is tending to be more and more difficult to stay away from any kind of “do”.
Somehow there is much urgency in mind to fill-up the free days of calendar with one thing or the other. Such minds even bump into friends’ time and end up spoiling the leisure of either.
To let things happen on a free day instead of making them happen should be the keynote of leisure. Things work out better to experience the joy when we do not plan to work them out. It is about time we remember that we are “human beings” but not “human doers”.
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