What do you enjoy doing most in your leisure time?
Work and leisure are less clearly delineated for me than I suspect they are for others. Less binary, more overlapping. Sure, there have been plenty of unleisurely stretches of work throughout my life, but the sense of accomplishment and discipline and investment transcends this overly binary breakdown of life activities. Often the most rewarding leisure time activities are fueled with hard work. And allowing for moments of leisure within work proves similarly nourishing, invigorating, and equilibrating.
That said, here are five especially enjoyable ways that I enjoy leisure time.
Wordsmithing
I love language! As a writer and word wrangler, my primary creative tool (also navigational and persuasion tool) is wordsmithing. Aloud, fountain pen on paper, digital bits and bytes,… as long as I’m cobbling words into ideas, there’s pluck in my heart and levity in my soul. Verbal sculpture. Linguistic dance. The texture of language enchants me!
Arting
Like the last two leisure time loves in this list (adventuring and wondering), wordsmithing and arting are also almost inextricably intertwined for me. Writing is a subset of arting, a personally essential mode of creation. But art itself is broad, perhaps infinitely so, and my appetite for artistic experimentation and exploration is vast. Creativity and creative risk are my drugs of choice!
From construction to poetry, gardening to doodling, landscaping to storytelling, cooking to essaying, arting is one of my most important leisure/work time activities. And I’m less than a week from diving into encaustic.
It’s worth noting that an equally vital aspect of arting is experiencing the art of others. Immersing myself in the creative process and output of other creators is nourishing and inspiring. Leisure time is art time!
Art. It’s a funny word. Drawing upon our imaginations, and our capacity for creativity, art is so much more ample and inclusive than the ways we habitually refer to it. An image hanging on a hook on a wall. A favorite song. An ephemeral dance. A delicate amuse-bouche that seduces with an unlikely medley of flavors and sensation…
Sporting
Another favorite leisure time is sport, especially outdoor sport like skiing, bicycling, wakesurfing, rowing, and sailing. To avoid redundancy I’ll abbreviate this section (supported with outgoing links to other related posts.)
Adventuring
For most/all of my life leisure time has been synonymous with adventure time. I eschew the familiar in favor of the unfamiliar and exotic. I am invigorated by. travel, flanerie, meandering, wandering, roving, exploring, etc.
Sometimes adventuring is super disciplined and mission focused. Other times it is the empowered by unplugging and permitting the unexpected, unfamiliar, and unanticipated to wash over me. Allowing myself to get a little bit lost as a good starting point!
Wondering
Like the first two leisure time loves in this list (wordsmithing and arting), wondering and adventuring are also closely related. I often conjoin them thus: wo/ander. Clever, right? 😉
Many of my adventures start with wonder. And many of Susan and my adventures start with wonder. Crazy curiosity. Plant a seed and let it germinate. Either it will wither or it will thrive. “I have kind of a crazy idea,” I start, pausing for permission. Sometimes I second-guess, decide to wait. Let the idea develop a little bit. Other times, I blurt it out, paint a poem in our minds, sketch a notion that we might want to explore. And sometimes it’s Susan who tosses me a what-if scenario to try on for size.
Curiosity is contagious. So much so that we both looked at Rosslyn’s boathouse in much the same condition as you see in that photo above. It was 2004 or 2005 and the boathouse was in rough shape. “One ice flow from a watery grave,” we would hear it described a year or so later. And yet we both began to wonder, what if that fabulous folly, this enchanting lakeside deckhouse were revitalized? What if it could be rehabilitated to its former glory and stocked with windsurfing, waterski, and wakesurfing equipment? What if it could become a water sport hub for our springs, summers, and falls on Lake Champlain?!
Leisure time wondering!
What do you think?