By Lida Prypchan
Give man a life of leisure and you will recognize him for what he really is.
We live only half a life. At first, we are oblivious of this fact and spend a good number of years distracted by uncertainty and indecision. Some people are plaqued by indecision for their entire lives. In the first instance, the indecision is unexpressed, leading to night after night of insomnia wondering what one wants of life.
This is the fundamental question for man, since he can find no answer for any of the others. Life is an intricate mystery that evolves in a place called Earth, a place inhabited by blind men who profess great faith. Once here, among this pageant of faces and masks, we begin to love life and adapt to circumstance, experience and learning. Everything is dealt out to us piecemeal – we get a dose of everything – with the peculiar result that we abandon ourselves to it on a continuous, even progressive basis. We are computers with feelings programmed into us. The true significance of our lives, the most important task is what each of us must determine for him (or her) self, in other words how we are to spend what is left of our time, and depends on our ability to take risks, to endure frustrations and on a game of dice called destiny. Doing what one likes is satisfying, but there is a price to pay. Life is an amusement park, full of diversions. We have a schedule and a function, which we can choose – if we are lucky.
What we call work is virtually a predetermined plan, insofar it does not grant man a life of leisure to be recognized for what he really is. The world would cease to be an amusement park and become a theater stage where everyone would have to show the fruits of his leisure or seclusion. Then, without work or obligations, we would see how people devote their time, above all, how they resolve their lives.
As much as we complain about jobs, work and fatigue, we have no desire to recognize that this is the vehicle for our escape. We run away from life because it is too complicated to understand. It is easier for us to send rockets to the moon and solve intricate abstractions than to face up to the simple problems of life without becoming frustrated. This simple practice is too complicated, so man is obliged to find an escape from so much impossible simplicity. Some people drown their sorrows in sex and alcohol, others in books and meetings and some do half of each, with indifference – maybe the latter are the most pragmatic and disillusioned, or perhaps the most conventional, because life can take singlemindedness to an extreme, thereby accentuating our individual tendencies and characteristics.
People who immerse themselves in books and ideas are deluding themselves if they think they are seeking the truth, for man’s intellectual sphere is merely an instinctive childhood game where an intellectual being tends to turn into a child, then a fool and finally a raving lunatic. After all, it’s much easier to be a child, a fool or a lunatic than a well-balanced adult – much easier than living a well-integrated life.
Work would become the anesthesia meted out to us by society so we can forget how deplorably inadequate we are in the art of living.
If you think I am a pessimist, I invite you to ansewer this question: abandon yourselves to a life of leisure and tell me whether you have achieved harmony or whether you have managed to live a whole life…
