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Learning to Value Your Leisure

Make sensible choices about what is best ignored versus what merits your attention

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A fine Sunday in October is as good a time as any to consider your predisposition toward leisure. As a concept, for many career professionals, leisure is on the rocks. Surely, it no longer means total hours minus work hours. True leisure time — enjoying a rewarding activity free from work and civic issues and from preoccupation with either of them — is difficult for many to achieve.

Why Leisure Time Gets Pinched

When the shift between a pressure-filled activity and true leisure time is abrupt, the quality of your leisure is likely to suffer. Is your leisure squeezed between frenzied activities? Strains of the workweek tend to make individuals place great emphasis on their weekends and other days off. They hope to relax, but the pressure is enormous, and often they can’t rest even when they’ve got the hours to do so.

Pressured individuals feel guilty both doing too much and doing too little. The often ask, “Could I have done more?” “Should I have done otherwise?” Even when blessed with leisure, they might not be free to enjoy it.

Parents in general, are often concerned about how much time they spend with their kids. Spouses feel guilty about periods spent away from each other. Pressed and frazzled by the onslaught of responsibilities, more couples are finding it exhausting to have to “be” with one another — to converse, empathize and respond.

The Consequences

In this 24/7 world, a cultural inability to relax dogs us and negates many benefits leisure traditionally provided. This, in turn, impacts the quality of our work. Even as more labor-saving and enhanced communication technologies are introduced, and our output and efficiency rises, our expectations directly increase. We become less satisfied with ourselves for not doing more.

The feeling of no breathing space can quickly pervade all aspects of your life, diminish your happiness and eliminate any joie de vivre. The cycle can get vicious. Lacking a balance between work and play, responsibility and respite, “getting things done” becomes the end-all. You start to function like a human doing instead of a human being. You begin to link successfully executing the items on your growing “to do” list with feelings of worthiness.

As the list keeps growing longer, the lingering sense of more to do infiltrates your sense of harmony and self-acceptance.

How to Cope

Recognize that everything on your “to-do” list, even at work, is undertaken at your option. You are not your tasks, they don’t define you and they don’t constrain you.

On a deeply felt personal level, recognize that from now on you will be subjected to an ever-increasing number of items competing for your attention. You cannot handle everything, nor is making the attempt desirable.

Recognize, with the clarity of death, that life is finite; you can no longer wistfully intake the daily deluge and expect to achieve balance. You cannot submissively yield to the din and settle for living your life in what’s left over after each day’s onslaught.

Make sensible choices about what is best ignored and what merits your attention.

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Jeff Davidson is the world's only holder of the title "The Work-Life Balance Expert®" as awarded by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. He is the premier thought leader on work-life balance, integration, and harmony. Jeff speaks to organizations that seek to enhance their overall productivity by improving the effectiveness of their people. He is the author of Breathing Space, Simpler Living, Dial it Down, and Everyday Project Management. Visit www.BreathingSpace.com for more information on Jeff's keynote speeches and seminars, including: Managing the Pace with Grace® * Achieving Work-Life Balance™ * Managing Information and Communication Overload®



 
 
 

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Family

Student Drinking and Drug Abuse on Campus is Over the Top

What kind of society, de facto, condones such reckless behavior?

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The senseless loss of five university students in a house fire has stung my community. These were top students, accomplished individuals, and potential leaders.

Someone has got to ask the tough questions right now, while the pain of their loss is intense. In what kind of society do presumably the best and brightest engage in highly questionable activities? An all-night party? Started at what hour? Preceded by what? To end when?

How much alcohol flows? How many drugs are dispensed? Obtained from and by whom? Ingested by whom? How many cigarettes are lit? How many butts wantonly burn down to nothing? What else is lit and smoked?

Foolish Behavior Condoned

The largest and toughest question of all behind these is what kind of society, de facto, condones such foolish and, in too many tragic instances, reckless behavior? Drunk students falling out of windows to their death, engaged in chugging contests until they vomit, on weeknights no less, walking the campus in a state of high lethargy? Being rushed to emergency wards?

Sure, install the proper sprinkler and alarm systems, but acknowledge the ruthless reality that confronts us. Colleges today are the stomping grounds for legions of students who drink and take drugs with abandon. They sit like zombies in morning classes if they can make it out of bed at all. Professors pretend that it is not happening. University administrators accept such behavior as ‘part of the times.’

Such phenomena are more wide sweeping than anyone cares to admit. They are testament to the abandonment of standards, the ‘everything is allowed’ overly permissive culture in which no student is safe.

Break the Silence

If the students who died were among the finest people that communities engender, what does their loss portend for others? And when will responsible adults break the silence about the utter absurdity with which too many students live their lives?

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Life

Give Thanks and Carry On

Have a Happy Thanksgiving, if you can

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Thanksgiving: that joyous time of the year when families get together, have a wonderful dinner, catch up on what everyone other is doing, give thanks for all that they have, and perhaps watch some football.

Up for the Challenge?

This Thanksgiving might prove to be a challenge for many people. For one, the cost of the turkey, the bird traditionally served, in some locals cost between 50% to 80% more than last year, and turkey was already expensive.

Among your relatives a few might be vegans or vegetarians. If you have a vegan enforcer in the family, this person will rail on and on against eating meat, and about how turkeys have lives just like we do.

One of your vegan or vegetarian relatives might offer a discourse on how cranberries should be harvested a different way, the dangers of turkey stuffing, and the problem with vegetables that you might be serving, the risk of having too many starches – potatoes or rice – and the evils of wine, beer, and other alcoholic drinks.

Topics Worth Avoiding

The politics to consider abound. Since roughly half of the country votes Democrat and half votes Republican, the odds are overwhelming that you’re going to have somebody with opposing politics at the table. During Trump’s years as president, many families had to navigate around the topic of the presidency, prevailing policies. and so on.

Today, while there’s no question that Joe Biden is completely inane as leader, the same delicate navigation needs to occur. As miraculous as this might seem, some on the left actually approve of what Biden has been doing. Note: don’t be concerned about the Bidens going hungry. With all those under-the-table payment from Ukraine and China, they can EASILY afford a huge, expensive turkey with all of the trimmings.

If you can avoid discussing the eight million invaders illegally crossing our borders, rampant inflation, the U.S. Afghanistan withdrawal, the crisis in Israel and potential for World War III, drag time story hour for children, transgenderism, the bogus lawsuits against Donald Trump, the unending crimes of Hunter Biden, the payola to Joe Biden, FBI corruption, the historic unpopularity and ineptness of Kamala Harris, and about 30 or so other topics, your dinner should go smoothly. Enjoy!

A huge current wrinkle on the political scene is that recent surveys reveal at least one-quarter of Democrats actually approve of Hamas, atrocities and all, and side with Palestine on all issues large and small. They believe that Israel is an apartheid state and that Jews are today’s Nazis. Apparently they’ve never visited Israel and have no Jewish friends.

Depending on how many Democrats attend your Thanksgiving gathering, if it’s four or more, mathematically speaking you have a decent chance that one is a pro-Hamas Democrat. Wooo…  Now, you really have to stay clear of current issues or your dinner table might be as inflamed verbally as the Middle East is with armaments.

Insufferable Stuffing

After everyone is stuffed with turkey, vegeburgers, or whatever the people who like rabbit food eat, you might sit in the den and turn on a football game. Quickly, you’ll have a stark reminder of how far political correctness has infected society.

If the Washington Commanders are playing, it’s hard to forget that they used to be called the Washington Redskins until the wokesters among us demanded that the name must be changed. Not so ironically, 90% of native Americans actually want the name Washington Redskins reinstalled, and currently are petitioning for it.

In baseball, the Cleveland Indians “had” to be renamed to the Cleveland Guardians. Potentially, there’s no end of this malarkey. Should the Minnesota Vikings change their name? After all, people from Scandinavia might object to the term “Vikings.” While we’re at it, consider college basketball. The Wake Forest University Demon Deacons are due for a name change, if you’re on the Left. So, too, the Duke University Blue Devils, the Arizona University Aztecs, and on and on.

Landmines to Side Step

With all these potential land mines to side step, and all the ways that otherwise pleasant conversations on a pleasant day could occur, you have to be on guard.

Nevertheless, I wish you and yours a happy Thanksgiving. May you survive the day, fully intact, and ready to have a decent Black Friday.

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