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Today’s Agenda
Busyness and Meaning
Good morning,
Happy Thursday, folks. Thirteen years ago I was told “It’s never going to be 6:30pm January 8, 2013 again. It’s 6:31. Time. It’s precious.” It’s stuck in my head every year since then, and I found it very fitting with this week’s theme so I thought I’d share it with you all.
Today, for our main course, we’ll be munching on the use of time. Burning that off, we’ll do a related thought exercise (it won’t take much time). Wrapping up with our Book Nook, we’ll open up Pieper’s Leisure: The Basis of Culture.
Have a seat. Thought Breakfast is served!
Today’s Breakfast
Leisure as Interior Freedom
Modern culture tends to treat busyness as a virtue. Your worth in society is largely measured by your productivity. Conversely, stillness is seen as laziness, wasted potential, or a waste of time.
Josef Pieper says, “Leisure is not idle time — it is the interior space where truth is received.”
This doesn’t mean dropping everything and just think all the time. There’s a distinction between meaningful busyness and busyness that exists to protect us from facing ourselves.
Pieper even says that work is a good thing; but when busyness becomes constant, it turns into a refusal (or avoidance) of stillness. Busyness has a way of becoming a distraction from anxiety, an avoidance of interior questions, or an escape from grief or a lack of meaning. It might create the illusion of meaning, but that busyness may just be hollow.
Pieper clarifies the myth that leisure is just relaxation, entertainment, or “time off.” Rather, he calls it inner posture; attentiveness and willingness to receive truth rather than produce output. Leisure is the space where reflection happens, memory deepens, and meaning has room to surface.
Heidegger showed us how we live inside time. Proust showed us how the past returns to us through memory. T.S. Eliot showed us that stillness is what gathers the past and future together. Pieper now points out that leisure is the condition that allows any of that to be understood in the first place. Because without interior space, time still passes, but never becomes meaning.
Burn Those Thought Calories
The Pace Check
Ask yourself one question:
Is my pace forming me? Or numbing me?
Then:
Name one activity this week that exhausted you but didn’t deepen you.
Name one moment of leisure you avoided for the sake of productivity.
Finally:
What kind of person is my current pace training me to become?
One who masks character development with mindless work? Or one that leaves room for truth to reveal itself
Book Nook
“Leisure is a form of silence,
of that silence which is the prerequisite of the apprehension
of reality;
only the silent hear — and those who do not remain silent
do not hear.” — Josef Pieper, Leisure: The Basis of Culture
By “silence,” Pieper doesn’t mean the quiet. He’s talking about interior stillness. This is the same stillness that relinquishes the constraint of time, which is what we’ve been talking about all week.
In Pieper’s view, truth isn’t something that we manufacture by way of endless effort and productivity. Truth is something we receive when we stop forcing meaning and allow reality to speak to us.
Being busy closes the ears of your soul so that your body can perform its earthly duties. Leisure, however, opens them. When we find ourselves in Pieper’s “silence,” we are no longer feeling the need to prove ourselves, chase usefulness, or trying to justify our existence. Instead, we become receptive.
Without leisure, time simply passes mindlessly. With leisure, time becomes interpretation, shaping identity rather than suppressing it.
Munch on that for today. Remember that leisure is not an escape from responsibility. It’s the interior space in which the self is able to respond truthfully to life. Have a great day, and come back tomorrow, where we’ll round this week off with another steaming hot plate of Thought Breakfast.
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That’s it for today.
Remember to stay mindful, smell the flowers, and take it easy.
Chef Ricky - Thought Breakfast
