In Defense of Leisure

Abstract

This article discusses the relationship between leisure and human communication and suggests that more attention is needed to study how leisure shapes human communication. After making a distinction between leisure and recreation, this article identifies the implications of leisure to the human condition through rejuvenating our attention to wonder, developing our sense of a-whereness, and advocating the experience of phenomenological listening. The call of leisure offers an alternative to the non-stop, fast-paced communicative environment that affects our ability to communicate with others. This article is offered in defense of leisure and calls for more transdisciplinary attention to leisure and the human condition.

Keywords:

• Communicative Humility
• Leisure
• Listening
• Philosophy of Communication
• Popular Culture

There has been significant scholarship emerging in the field of leisure studies from a variety of perspectives that explore how people practice leisure in different environments and the outcomes of such practices (Haney & Kline, 2010; Holba, 2007; Rojek, 1985, 1995, 2005, 2010; Sivan & Stebbins, 2011; Stebbins, 2011). The outcomes identified in these studies range from effects upon interpersonal, group, family and work environments, and relationships to global economic and political catastrophes.

A key element in all of these studies involves some kind of communicative component. This article discusses the relationship between leisure and human communication and suggests that more attention is needed to study how leisure shapes human communication. This article first establishes a distinction between leisure and recreation. Second, this article identifies implications of leisure to the human condition through attention to wonder, a-whereness, and listening. Finally, this article synthesizes a communicative defense of leisure and calls for broader transdisciplinary attention to leisure and human communication. Through a theoretical investigation and a communicative positioning of leisure, this article articulates a broadly considered endorsement of leisure and its implications to human communication.

Robert Stebbins (2011) claimed that the road ahead for leisure studies has unavoidable pitfalls related to funding research and limited academic studies. He identified some causes of this prospective future that include “failure to get the word out to the larger world about what we have learned about leisure” and that “when we do try to talk to people outside of leisure studies, no one listens” (Stebbins, 2011, p. 4). Sivan and Stebbins (2011) further explored how leisure is defined within the field of leisure studies, suggesting that there are multiple definitions and perspectives that sometimes overlap and sometimes diverge significantly. Some studies often discuss the relationship between leisure and education as two different experiences. This reinforces a misunderstanding that connects leisure to relaxation and freedom, which separates it further from engaged learning.

The association of leisure with freedom and relaxation moves the meaning of leisure away from its etymological roots because leisure is hard work that results in some kind of learning. The Greek and Latin words for leisure originate from a word for school, schole (skole) and scola, respectively (Pieper, 2009). Leisure is misrepresented today because it is often co-mingled with the understanding of recreation in such a way that diminishes our ability to see the distinction between the two terms and, more specifically, the value that leisure brings to our lives that recreation cannot. While some scholars have rearticulated leisure as a re-creation experience that rejuvenates individuals (Blackshaw, 2010; Gleason, 1999), using such similar terms is not enough to shift public understanding.

The movement away from using problematic terms such as recreation or re-creation is necessary for our reinterpretation and renewed understanding of leisure. For example, in William Gleason's (1999) argument for a leisure ethic, he posited recreation as “re-creation,” using both of the terms as experiences separate from work. Gleason's discussion does not distinguish between leisure and recreation; rather he used the terms recreation, re-creation, and leisure interchangeably. The failure to distinguish terminology reinforces a lack of distinction between leisure and recreation, thus it also reinforces confusion between the meanings and experiences of both concepts. By maintaining consistency with the Latin and Greek original terms, the attention remains on the action of learning instead of on the outcome of the experience.

Leisure cultivates intellectual space that transforms human communicative engagement undergirded by two ethical principles, care for the self and care for the other (Rojek, 2010). In the communication discipline, care has been well established in the discourse on ethical communication and human relationships (Baker-Ohler & Holba, 2009; Gaylin, 1976; Gilligan, 1982; Mayeroff, 1972; Noddings, 1984, 2002; Tronto, 1993; Wood, 1994). Care has explicit social, psychological, philosophical, and ethical implications to the self and to the self in relation to the other. The relationship between care and leisure is just one facet that supports a need for a broad transdisciplinary attention to leisure. Elevating leisure to be an essential component of one's communicative life broadens our understanding as to the value of leisure to human communication.

In times of economic uncertainties, it is often those areas that appear to be nonessential that bear the burden of financial cuts and weakened public interest/value in supporting of those activities, but this is a turn away from what is really needed. A misunderstanding of leisure imposes a judgment that renders leisure a nonessential experience. However, in times of economic uncertainty, we need to support what is important to our human condition. It is in these times leisure ought to be our primary concern. Leisure lays the foundation from which we engage the world around us in times of plenty and especially in times of scarcity.

There are many cultural perspectives on leisure. There are times that the two terms, leisure and recreation, are used synonymously, which implies that they are the same kind of experience. Both leisure and recreation are uniquely important to the human condition. However, today, especially in westernized societies, many people do not make an intellectual distinction between them even though they are two very different kinds of experiences (Sivan & Stebbins, 2011). Recreation provides those sometimes much needed moments of rest and periods of distance from work that enable a return to work feeling refreshed. On the other hand, leisure provides more of a longer lasting retreat into a different kind of work that is removed from working-for-a-living, and the experience is open to serendipitous transformation.

There may be a variety of reasons for the lack of intellectual distinction between leisure and recreation today, such as the economic growth of the “leisure” industry (Solnet, 2012), the privileging of research involving social scientific or scientific perspectives over the humanities in general (MacKinnon, Coxe, & Baraldi, 2012), or perhaps an unexpected consequence of modernity that suggests if it cannot be measured, then it does not exist (Kane, 1993; Wallerstein, 1996). Empirical studies may find it easier to measure the obvious and external actions of people engaged in activities, but they also might overlook the significance of the human science of “lived experience” that involves an internal experience of the mind that is embodied in the actions of the individual (Van Manen, 1990, p. 35). Recognizing the incarnate mind in leisure suggests “the body is much more than an instrument or means; it is our expression in the world, the visible form of our intentions” (Merleau-Ponty, 1975, p. 5). It is in the interior action of the mind where the spirit of leisure begins and provides the movement for embodied action. The interior of our perceptions is engaged in the life-world as a conscious activity that constitutes being in its action. Perceptual bodily engagement is an active interrogation of spatial and temporal phenomena with a focusing movement on the thing itself as well as on one's own bodily participation in the movement. Perceptual bodily engagement is inseparable from the attention our minds bring to the action. This alone reminds us that, consistent with Merleau-Ponty's argument abolishing dualism, leisure is expressive corporeity. Algis Mickunas (2007) suggested corporeal expressivity “can assume an ‘embodiment,’ since it is not yet something ‘interior’ or subjective, but rather directly present, inner-worldly and yet transcendent of materiality” (p. 156). This articulates an abandoning of inner-outer dualism and emphasizes the inseparability of mind and body. In the experience of leisure, inseparability is the catalyst for transcendence and transformation. This kind of expressivity cannot be rushed or hurried, though in our vastly mediated environment of instant and the quick, people miss the experience.

People in general may be tired of engaging their environment at a fast pace. The Slow Movement is a growing critical mass that advocates being more mindful about what you do every day. Carl Honoré (2004) is a leading contributor in the Slow Movement discourse, and he provided some startling evidence regarding the culture of fast in which we find ourselves. Honoré (2004) advocated slowing down and tending to daily life through a more thoughtful and purposive manner; he did not mean everything we do should be done slowly; he refered to how we think about what it is we are doing. However, when describing leisure in context, he made no distinction between leisure and recreation and seems surprised that it is given scholarly attention.

Honoré's (2004) minimization of leisure is implied when he stated, “[i]n a world obsessed with work, leisure is a serious matter … [l]eisure studies is even [emphasis added] an academic discipline” (p. 216). He provided commentary on the history of leisure in the western world, advancing the notion that the United Nations “declared it a basic human right in 1948” and describing our culture with evidence of leisure such as, being “inundated with books, websites, magazines, TV shows, and newspaper supplements dedicated to hobbies and having fun” (p. 216). Honoré (2004) finally refered to leisure being a use of our “free time” (p. 216). This is simply not the case. His conclusion asserts that even with all of these additions to our society, people are still focused on work—they are saturated with thinking and doing work.

Honore's (2004) conclusion may be accurate but his description and references to leisure contradict the philosophical ground of leisure established by Aristotle (2001) that situates leisure a first principle of all action. While Aristotle might not have believed slaves and the lower classes of people in his culture could do leisure, the important point he made about leisure is that it is the first principle of all action—at least for the wealthy class. The cast system was an integral part of Greek culture, but beyond that, Aristotle's understanding of the value of leisure to ethical human action is paramount.

The title of Honoré's (2004) chapter connecting the idea of slow with leisure is “Leisure: The Importance of Being at Rest.” For the ancient, renaissance, and enlightenment thinkers, and contemporary scholars, leisure is not rest—it is not idleness. Returning to the etymology of leisure, when one is in leisure, one is not idle. In leisure, we are busier than when we are not at leisure or, more possibly, than when we are at work. We are also not alone in leisure because we are dialogically interacting with the ideas in an embodied play, a dialogical interaction expressed within and between one's mind and body—a thinking and doing in sync.

Leisure is hard work, beginning with our mindful approach to something to an embodied experience. Two important aspects of leisure are focus of attention and the embodied experience that follows. These two aspects are very different as one engages recreation. Leisure comes out of our attention to the things themselves, and these things can be anything; it is the approach to the things themselves that is central to how we understand and do leisure. Misconceptions emerge through popular culture about the nature of leisure, and consequently this makes the need for a more public and widespread attention to leisure more pressing.

Leisure

Leisure is an embodied philosophical act that begins with a mental and spiritual focus of attention that undergirds the bodily action, unlike recreation, which does not require the same kind of focus of attention. Unlike leisure, recreation includes external considerations such as trying to beat an opponent, trying to persuade someone about something, or engaging an action between two other commitments for a purpose driven by other external constraints. Some recreation activities are taken very seriously and some others are not.

For recreation, one can take an occasional walk during a work break or play in a softball or bowling league after work, where winning is the competitive edge that drives the desire to play. One might plan a family vacation to do a myriad of activities that leaves no room for mental and spiritual reflection. Some people might try different kinds of activities outside of work, such as taking a bus trip to a casino, reading a book, or swimming. These are activities that remain separate from work, and they are sought after to relieve tension in general or to enjoy the competitive experiences.

The truth is that these activities offer limited respite and should be more accurately considered a diversion or a coffee break from regular work-a-day schedules—which is also another necessary kind of engagement for the human condition. Sometimes people participate in activities in a weekly or monthly schedule, but they may not reflect upon the activity or experience in between their playing moments. Some people participate in activities because they are socially required to do so, such as an office bowling league or a teenager who is encouraged by her parents to play a sport, a musical instrument, or to try out for the school play.

Recreation gives us a break from our work or from the mundane experiences that we are required to do, but the experience lacks the metal and spiritual focus of attention as one embodies in leisure. In recreation, the commitment to the activity is driven by seeking a particular outcome that inherently imposes limits to the possibility of outcomes. For example, if I am on a bowling team for my work or neighborhood, my participation might be driven by the desire for a promotion at work or an increase in status of my role and reputation in the company or in the community but not necessarily on the experience of bowling and my relationship to the ball, pins, or artfulness of the game itself.

If I participate in a bowling team with my co-workers because we want to compete against other businesses, my attention is already pulled away from the experience itself, and it is pulled toward something else: winning. This activity enslaves the participants to a competitive focus. If winning is my aim in the action, I cannot be engaging in leisure because my phenomenological focus of attention is on the outcome or the end result, which alienates and estranges me from the nature of the activity. With this kind of focus, the engagement of such activity is performed in the spirit of recreation—a different yet noble focus.

Recreation is important to human existence because it provides a short diversion and breaks up the monotonous moments that fill the day, but it is not going to provide the long-term and sometimes surprising consequences that leisure creates. Recreation provides a release and a distance that is necessary to help regenerate the ability to continue working, but that regeneration is short-lived and when we return to our work or move to another obligation, we feel little or no release as we move back into our former state of being—the release is short-lived. This is just one aspect of recreation that makes it different from leisure.

Leisure and recreation should co-exist in the landscape of human experience. Making this distinction does not trivialize or privilege one experience over the other. Leisure provides long-lasting and sometimes surprising consequences; it is an embodied experience where the outcome is not the aim or focus.

Leisure is an embodied philosophical act that places our focus of attention on the intellectual play and bodily experience of the act. In leisure, thinking and feeling the act for its own sake is unencumbered by impositions from spatial or temporal boundaries created by the environment. Intentionality in leisure is crucial, and it is shaped by the author rather than by external constraints. Intentionality is governed by a focus of attention to-the-things-themselves embedded within the corporeal experience.

Human beings need both leisure and recreation in their lives. Unfortunately, today in our fast-paced, mediated environment, we often forget about leisure and we permit our default engagement to be in the spirit of recreation. Since leisure begins from a contemplative spirit, it does not attract our attention because of its perceived slowness. Perhaps it is leisure that asks more from us—it commits us to a kind of experience that holds us accountable.

Mitchell Haney (2010) argued that the value of leisure is inherently in its slowness. We no longer tolerate being slow in our society because the way media have trained us, as spectators, to accept that everything should be in the here and now, not in the to be and not yet. We do have difficulty slowing down, yet slowing down permits a thoughtful play experience that is necessary for leisure.

Leisure involves a mindful doing without an interest in the end result; recreation involves a different kind of attention that is focused on the end or the outcome. The action in leisure is explored for the sake of the action itself. If one performs something (a string quartet) or makes something (a bird carving or a piece of furniture), one can be paid if one is still making the object or performing the piece for the sake of the experience itself—this can be in the form of a stipend, a gift, a fee that is not designed to fully support you financially, or an agreement of barter or exchange. But this means there is a fine line that one walks because once the focus of attention of the actor moves toward outcomes of the experience, such as turning your quartet playing into a business and playing music to walk a bride down an aisle for her wedding or taking orders to make birds to sell for a living (working-for-a-living), the nature and experience of the act changes and you become enslaved to the other instead of the act.

In leisure, our inspiration comes from the thing itself; in recreation, our inspiration comes from something outside of our self and something other than the thing itself. A life that engages leisure exemplifies mindful attention to actions grounded in a communicative humility that invites learning, intellectual development, and physical embodiment of the philosophical act.

Implications of Leisure to Human Communication

The implications of leisure to human communication are open to infinite possibilities. One of those possibilities involves the development of communicative humility. The cultivation of conversational skills is a lifelong process, but there is more to conversational agility than learning conventions and structures and applying them on a whim or in a scripted fashion. In communicative humility, communicative performances are evaluated, monitored, and adjusted toward exemplifying communication competence.

Communicative humility has hermeneutic implications as it cultivates the ability to care for ourselves and others—through communicative humility, conversational agility is informed by virtues that open meaning and have the power to transform human relationships and ideas. Consequently, the human communicative condition becomes shaped by Aristotelian virtues of phronesis (practical wisdom), praxis (theory-informed action), and sophia (the love of wisdom)—these are outcomes that enable one to communicatively care for the self and the other in helpful ways.

First and foremost, in leisure, sophia drives one's interest, and phronesis and praxis evolve as one experiences sophia. How they evolve and what results from the cultivation of phronesis and praxis is unencumbered and not forced. Human understanding and action change, evolve, and grow as sophia is engaged, and it is this growth that one cannot predetermine or demand. Leisure is an embodied action of work that focuses on and is driven by the love for ideas.

Human understanding involves engaging practical aspects of teaching ourselves how to live with others in meaningful ways, and this understanding is open to changes in thinking and in actions. Leisure cultivates the ability to engage in meaningful conversation with others as well as within ourselves; it has the authority to transform how we see the world and how we engage the world and others.

Communicative humility, undergirded by hermeneutic humility, is an interpretive approach we take to phenomena as we try to make meaning within our everyday experiences. Calvin Schrag and Ramsey Eric Ramsey (1994) develop the notion of hermeneutic humility through their discussion of phenomenological research which necessitates a humility and commitment to interpretation. Through the notion of hermeneutic humility, two conditions exist. The first condition is narratival interpretation, and the second condition is transversal comprehension.

Narratival interpretation involves two interpretive layers: first, a holistic understanding of something, and second, the analytic explanation of something. Transversal comprehension negotiates between conflicting interpretations through the interplay between understanding and explanations of perspectives. In narratival interpretation, the interpretive layers are moments that exhibits an “economy of the ‘hermeneutic as,’ the taking of something as some-thing” (Schrag & Ramsey, 1994, p. 131). In this hermeneutic moment, the interplay between analytic explanation, through grammatical, semiotic, and conceptual analysis, occurs while seeking and maintaining a holistic understanding. The analytical explanation does not negate or separate meaning from the interpretive act and the outcome, but it does open to a particular literacy that has the power to transform meaning to something new.

Transversal comprehension reflects the conflicting interpretations that emerge from the analytical explanation in the first hermeneutic moment. Conflicting interpretations erupt from competing narratives and perspectives confronted by a “polysemy and surplus of signifiers” (Schrag & Ramsey, 1994, p. 133). Recognizing these conflicting interpretations, transversal comprehension enables third ways to emerge that permit conversational competence to develop so that communication does not shut down or become toxic in nature. This means that transversal comprehension encourages competing and differing ideas to inform and influence one another in an open spirit. Narratival interpretation dissects the ideas and influences while maintaining a holistic respect for the ideas, even in their imperfect state; transversal comprehension invites intellectual generosity and encouragement which can identify those third or other ways of engaging conflicting or competing ideas without shutting them down.

Hermeneutic humility encourages individuals to stay on the task of communication competence so that ideas can be tried and tested and adapted and adopted. Leisure reinforces constructive discipline to stay the course when ideas are challenging, which cultivates a hermeneutic humility from which one can engage new ideas, old ideas, and shifting ideas. Hermeneutic humility permits one to see a third way which can transform conversational agility and how the world is perceived and engaged.

Narratival interpretation and transversal comprehension undergird a hermeneutical practice and can be applied to other aspects of life beyond conversation. Therefore, when life is practiced through and within a hermeneutic humility, one can be open to new ideas, respectful of difference, accepting of otherness, and genuinely concerned about the discourse at hand. This does not mean one is gullible or relativistic—this means that one engages the other through a hermeneutical competence that considers first then decides and acts. Hermeneutical competence creates a space situated within a communication context that reinforces a communicative humility.

Communicative humility is necessary for the care of ourselves and others. In a practical sense, hermeneutic humility cultivates a communicative humility that waits, listens, and remains open. It is not easy to embrace this nature because as human beings, we are selfish and we want to get our way. This natural state of being impedes our reflexivity and teaches us to act first and then think. Hermeneutic and communicative humility encourage patience and a practiced and thoughtful approach to life that enables us to remain open even within our own biases and passions.

Transversality fosters understandings that are imbued with sophia, phronesis, and praxis rather than thoughtlessness or tunnel vision. Leisure cultivates a communicative humility and communication occurs “in spite of not understanding, misunderstanding and contesting much of what is said and done by one's antagonist” (Schrag & Ramsey, 1994, p. 136). Communicative humility avoids mindless or scripted applications of structures and conventions to one's experiences, and it is essential for us to learn, especially as we live within competing narratives and continuing flux in our daily lives.

Leisure prepares us to engage others thoughtfully, genuinely, and ethically; it is through a hermeneutic openness and competence that this occurs. Communicative humility is fostered by conditions that we experience in leisure such as a contemplative spirit, mindfulness in our approaches to phenomena, patience, waiting, and seeking. Implications of leisure to the human condition involve the cultivation of wonder, having a sense of “a-whereness,” and the experience of phenomenological listening.

Wonder

Wonder emerges as we tend to ideas unencumbered by predetermined outcomes—the philosophical act becomes enacted and embodied through careful and mindful thought. Wonder can be understood as a form of Martin Heidegger's (1966) “meditative thinking” (p. 46). Meditative thinking permits one to take time with ideas, thoughts, and experiences to gently ponder what it is before us. Heidegger made a distinction between meditative thinking and calculative thinking, which is a kind of scientific thinking that has overtaken our environment due to scientific and technological advancements. Linda Wiener and Ramsey Eric Ramsey (2005) refered to trademarks of this kind of environment as being overwhelmed by “overpowering, fast-paced, and computational practices” that limit the outcomes of our thinking and doing (p. 80).

If we turn to meditative thinking, we can come to an understanding without a demand and without structures designed to over calculate or smother our experience. Merleau-Ponty (1975) reminded us that our experience of the world comes before our understanding of it, which means that without experience, understanding is inaccessible. We come to understand this pre-objective through our ability to wonder, our ability to take our time with careful and attentive reflection about the thing before us and our experience with it.

Leisure is an embodied action of wonder that requires both the mind and body informing each other. Gadamer (1975/2002) told us that we cannot go outside of ourselves through an “objective consciousness” and understand who we are because when we are outside of ourselves we are not able to penetrate appearances that inform our understanding (p. 253). Through wonder, we become “inwardly aware” of ourselves—the inner consciousness of our own being—in relation to the outside world (Gadamer, 1975/2002, p. 253). If we understand philosophical leisure as a phenomenological experience governed by our perceptions through our incarnate mind, we situate leisure into our perceptual field of action. By asking ourselves what makes philosophical leisure essential to human existence, we acknowledge that our perceptions are inescapably linked to our experiences.

Leisure cultivates one's ability to wonder. Wonder is the act of learning to see, of playing with ideas, and enabling one to see beyond permits transcendence and transformation because it is an expressive seeking outside of impositions of limits and boundaries. In wonder, we can see otherwise—an embodied reflection that develops a sense of “a-whereness,” an embodied revelation.

A-whereness

Leisure enables one to care for the self and care for the other because it cultivates one's interiority, one's sense of “a-whereness” (Ramsey, 1998, p. 76), and one's capacity to listen. The notion of “a-whereness” refers to “two moments of recognition” that are simultaneously present, a “passive potentiality and active capacity” which opens to a disclosure of possibilities (Ramsey, 1998, p. 76). A-whereness affects what is possible since it is related to experience that permits disclosure that cannot be totalized. A-whereness, a concept broader than an intentional awareness of our perception, cultivates an embodied communicative humility that enables one to remain open to learning and experiencing something other than what is already. This openness requires patience and a presence that is both here and there—acknowledging what is and what may be, which reminds us that to experience a-whereness means that the task is unending. A-whereness guards against totality of arrogance, presumptions, and closed-mindedness—a “finitude” that creates impossibility and failure to see (Ramsey, 1998, p. 78).

A-whereness is inescapably related to intentionality as it weaves together a tapestry of human experience, as human beings are simultaneously aware of being somewhere as well as being aware of something (Ramsey, 1998). A-whereness is an embodied explication of intentionality, and it is the kind of intentionality that exists in leisure; it is an intentionality that is aware and a-where of spatial and temporal elements yet outside of constraints that encumber the experience. The sense of time in leisure is more of a time that exists outside of chronological or measured time.

This assertion is expanded upon by Charles Guignon and Kevin Aho (2010) who suggested that the loss of leisure in western culture is not from a “deficit of leisure in American life” rather the loss comes from a new way of experiencing “lived time” that is over consumed with work time. This overly saturated experience of work in American culture “has closed off older experiences of time, experiences that shatter the everyday, repetitive rhythm of clock-time” and consequently we have no more room in our day to evoke the possibility of transformational experiences (Guignon & Aho, 2010, p. 27). A-whereness permits an engagement that re-opens the world in a way that allows for the exploration of things by shattering constraints imposed upon people by linear, measured, or chronological thinking about time.

Guignon and Aho (2010) refered to time experienced in leisure as a “higher time” that is a “breakthrough of the transcendent” (p. 35). It is in this conceptualization of time when a-whereness permits an aesthetical seeing that infinite possibilities become part of the experience. A-whereness calls out to the present moment and permits revelation, transcendence, and novelty to shape the experience. Interiority and a-whereness are two aspects that shape the experience of leisure but the key to both of these aspects resides in a phenomenological mode of listening.

Listening

Knowing our interiority and developing a sense of a-whereness depends upon how we listen. Listening is a coordinate that is both necessary for the engagement of leisure and it is cultivated by the embodied action in leisure. Lisbeth Lipari (2010) described an understanding of leisure that she refers to as “listening being,” which is a phenomenological experience and a philosophical challenge (p. 348). This is an opening that invites a rethinking through listening and engagement of consciousness “beyond discursive thought, to places of understanding that language cannot, as yet, reach” (Lipari, 2010, p. 348). This is a listening beyond what we see before us, and it generously gives “voice to others” (Holba, 2011, p. 53). Listening is a hermeneutical action.

Our listening being involves a disruption. Listening disrupts intellectual habits and thoughts—it is “an encounter with a radical alterity” that leads to new ideas and new starting places from which we engage the other and the surrounding conversational landscape (Lipari, 2010, p. 350). Listening in this fashion cultivates the ground for community as well as individual understandings and comprehensions. If listening is not part of intellectual and conversational habits, the loss of innovation, collaboration, and growth of community become at risk of annihilation. Listening is an ecological necessity that will shake up conversational terrain through a spirit of hermeneutic and communicative humility. Leisure cultivates the intellectual habit of listening and, in this regard, also develops a state of hermeneutical attention that is open to new ideas, creativity in thought, and the acknowledgment that there is more than one possible perspective. In this kind of listening, we are permitted to wonder in an open terrain negotiated through corporeal expression and hermeneutic attention that resists the temptation to engage automatic or scripted behaviors. The listening being liberates us from preconceived ideas and expectations because it is these notions that limit resources, attitudes, and possibilities. The listening being is a hermeneutic embodiment that enhances the way we think, experience, and communicate because it informs how we listen to others, how we think about ideas, and how enact and engage others. The listening being heralds rhetorical implications; it is a rhetorical opening to possibilities, and it can awaken our intuitions, give us a sense of control, shift our perceptions, and cultivate understanding of our experiences that transcends the here and now.

Leisure: A Communicative Defense

The ideas of remembering to wonder, seeking a-whereness, and listening to the present moment can be liberating yet we often meet these conceptualizations with resistance. If we permit ourselves to take these risks, we might become liberated from our passions and begin to see different paths. This is a hermeneutic process that encounters inherent problems from a culture of fast where we speak fast, eat fast, travel fast, consume fast, and think fast, and we cannot slow down ourselves because our mediated environment has habituated this culture of fast in our daily experiences. In response to this environment of fast, there are cultural movements emerging around the world that acknowledge fastness as being harmful to the human condition. The Center for the Contemplative Mind in Society and the Slow Movement are just two examples that demonstrate the environment and culture of fast as problematic.

The Center for the Contemplative Mind in Society (http://www.contemplativemind.org/) is an organization devoted to integrating mindful awareness in contemporary lives. The organization is a resource for people who recognize that they are either too busy or not able to find time for reflection, reflexion, and mindfulness in their everyday lives. People who feel caught up in the busyness of doing often without thinking seek out opportunities to reconnect with their interior selves. The organization is also a meeting place for other organizations such as the Association for the Contemplative Mind in Higher Education to come together for the same cause but within in a specific context. The Center supports and advocates learning opportunities and retreats at places such as The Garrison Institute (http://www.garrisoninstitute.org/) and The Fetzer Institute (http://www.fetzer.org/)—both of which focus retreats on the integration of mindfulness in daily life. The Center is a support mechanism and gathering place for individuals seeking an alternative to our fast-paced and overly saturated mediated environment.

The Slow Movement (http://www.slowmovement.com/) is a grass roots organization that is catching on. The mission of The Slow Movement is to devoted to addressing the problem of “time poverty,” since many people find they never have enough time even in the age of fast, quick, instant, and brief. People are simply too busy and do not know how to slow down. The Slow Movement brings mindfulness into popular culture vocabulary and suggests it is one solution to the problems emerging from the culture of fast. They do not advocate doing everything physically slower; the main idea behind the movement is to do everything more mindfully.

Carl Honoré (2004) has brought the slow movement into the homes of many Americans who otherwise might not have considered going “slow.” The Slow Movement advocates connections over doing things fast simply for the sake of completing tasks. It invites people to be more mindful in all of their daily activities, even those mundane things such as eating and driving to work. The premise that undergirds both of these examples suggests that the culture of fast and quick interferes with the ability to be mindful which is a more humane and integral way of communicating in the world. From this idea, a host of other problems can arise. Leisure is one way to respond to these problems that arise in the culture of fast and quick. Leisure calls to us and calls us out; leisure shapes who we are and who we become.

Like the call to reconnect the contemplative mind with society or the call to slow ourselves down, the call of leisure offers an alternative—a possibility that calls us to wonder, to develop a sense of a-whereness, and engage as listening being. By focusing on slowing down and turning toward being mindful in actions, we can recuperate these communicative problems generated by the culture of fast. The engagement of leisure teaches us to slow down and be at play with ideas. The value of ideas, individual and collective intellectual growth, and learning to be more fully present in our listening habituates care for ourselves and care for the other. Leisure provides an alternative path that permits us to be fully present with ourselves and toward others that cultivates a communicative humility essential for communicative health of individuals and community.

Leisure offers an alternative to the nonstop, fast-paced communicative environment that is saturated by media and other stimuli that attack and sever our attention and our ability to authentically and generously communicate with others. This article calls for renewed scholarly interest in leisure for the health of the human communicative condition. Whether from public or private communication environments, communication and leisure are inescapably tied together, and it is our intellectual responsibility to recognize this relationship and seek to study it as thoroughly as we can. Leisure is a practice that cultivates a communicative humility which enables us to slow down, develops our sense of wonder, provokes a sense of embodied a-whereness, and teaches us to listen to our surroundings, all of which shape our communicative sensibilities and practices. Through leisure we gain competence in communicative humility so we no longer think, consume, and do without a mindful tending to the possibilities.

Leisure helps us to remain open to the realm of possibilities because it requires and cultivates a communicative humility necessary to negotiating existence where we meet the other in a space of shared meaning. This article is offered in defense of leisure because the culture of fast in which we find ourselves obscures us from ourselves and the other. Leisure is one way that we can remember ourselves and our commitment to the other in a communicatively violent environment.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Annette M. Holba

Annette M. Holba (Ph.D., Duquesne University, 2005) is an Associate Professor in the Department of Communication and Media Studies at Plymouth State University.