The word, ‘Leisure,’ come from a Latin word that means to be free. Leisure is anything that gives us a sense of freedom from the cares and demands of life, while we are doing it. But to build leisure into life we often have to disassemble something else. In Thomas Moore’s book Meditations, he tells of a pilgrim walking along a road and sees some monks working on a stone building. His first reaction was that it was good to see the monks improving the abbey building. But then he realised that they were actually tearing it down. So he went to the abbot and asked why. ‘My son,’ the abbott replied. ‘We are tearing it down so that we can see the sunrise at dawn.’
To live deeply we need to maintain a balance between activity and meaningful inactivity. To do that usually means getting rid of something