A Time To Reflect
We ignore the source of our motivations because we shirk reflecting. This is why we love to work; it is better to run and be busy all day than have a chat with your inner demons.
Greetings friends, you are reading The Busymind Project. Today’s letter is a collection and recycling of essays I wrote before but I have added a fresh note. After all, I have improved since the time I wrote them. I hope it helps.
Leisure: Another Kind of Work
Utilitarianism gives “useful” a narrow meaning. So narrow that only a handful of things can squeeze themselves through the definition without debasing themselves. No wonder, people who hold – strictly – the utilitarian view of usefulness are as debased as they get. To identify such people, look out for people who discard the aesthetic values of rituals, traditions, and leisure as “pointless.” They are debased.
Leisure is another kind of work. A type of work that is separate from what the debased define as useful.
Leisure – this different type of work – is not the same as idleness. It is a different type of work because it requires a commitment to something of a different nature; often classified as transcendental and it takes men of spirit to join this work; a contemplative work.
Sir Roger Scruton said, “Leisure is not the cessation of work, but work of another kind, work restored to its human meaning, as a celebration and a festival.”
Read my essay Everything Does Not Have To Be Useful to understand better.
An Apple and a Bath
Still on leisure. A lot of the good we currently celebrate in a stiff, rigid, technocratic manner emerged from moments of rest, leisure, and contemplation.
George Spencer said of Isaac Newton that “To arrive at the simplest truth, as Newton knew and practiced, requires years of contemplation. Not activity. Not reasoning. Not calculating. Not busy behavior of any kind. Not reading. Not talking. Not thinking. Simply bearing in mind what it is that one needs to know.”
Contemplative work has never been mainstream. It was seen as the property or activity of a separated caste such as aristocracies or religious men. But we can observe streams of this trait in the lives and work of all-time greats. But in my essay An Apple and A Bath, I looked at Archimedes and Isaac Newton. Today I bring the essay to you again so that you may read it and draw your own conclusions. Enjoy.
A Time to Reflect
What happens when you abandon introspection and contemplation?
I think of psychology and logic as fundamentally different because of the direction where they work best. By psychology, I do not mean the now pop mental medical science rife in our time. Rather I mean the rich diction offered by diligent men to give us tools to analyze ourselves.
Psychology, when pointed inwards, does much good. Point it outwards and it begins to lose its potency. Use it willy-nilly and it becomes poison. Resist psychoanalysing everyone around you; at least resist doing so loudly and authoritatively.
We ignore the source of our motivations because we shirk reflecting. This is why we love to work; it is better to run and be busy all day than have a chat with your inner demons. This essay is a call to reflect.
Again, Sir Scruton asserted that “For here, in a succinct yet learned argument, are all the reasons for thinking that the frenzied need to work, to plan, and to change things is nothing but idleness under other names — moral, intellectual, and emotional idleness. In order to defend itself from self-knowledge, this agitated idleness is busy smashing all the mirrors in the house.”
Read the essay A Time to Reflect here.
Here is your picture. Have a great week. And oh! Welcome to September.
