Holidays as a Moral Imperative

A holiday is a luxury, and yet I feel in a small sense morally obliged to take one if I have the means to do so.  Taking a holiday for me is like having wine at dinner; it goes beyond necessity into a kind of properly human virtue. Wine bespeaks festivity, a holiday, leisure. Both are jolly with a delight in superfluity.

Leisure poses a challenge to me. I seek out activity--usually intellectual and relational--and find it difficult to rest. During Lent I gave up reading blogs and other forms of internet-delivered news. I was surprised to find the wheels of my mind restlessly spinning. I'm tempted to pile on metaphors here: I kept looking for sneaky ways to supply grist for my mind's mill, fodder for thought. My mind felt like a sewing machine running and clacking and whirring but without any thread in the needle. Josef Pieper writes of restless activity as a species of sloth, which masquerades as the virtue opposite to a dull indolence. For Pieper, the opposite of sloth is not busy-ness, but leisure. My inability to quiet the vain chatter of my mind in the darkness of the nights as I nursed Al shows that this is a sin to which I am prone.

My busy indolence has come even more to the foreground with parenthood. As a mother who is trying to work and be present to her baby, I feel the ticking of time passing as steady forward pressure on my back. If Al is asleep, a million things deferred cry for my attention, and I rush from dishes to laundry to emails to paperwork until she wakes. I wonder sometimes if working is a red herring here, though. I feel "on call" for Al at any time, day or night, and I never know when she will need me, so I rush my other tasks to be ready and available and fully present. I suspect non-gainfully-employed me would feel little different.

So all the more, a holiday has become a moral imperative. It is something I ought to do. And yet, to do it puts another task on my list: planning! But what is another task, really? The list is never all crossed off anyways. I need to learn to live well with my list, and not make myself a slave to its seeming demands.