In Appreciation of Leisure

Yesterday I watched Les Miserables and was reminded what life was like not all that long ago. Now, it is true the film represents the seedier part of life in Paris in 1840s or so. Today standing in a warm shower, one I took for the sole purpose of getting a bit warmer after a mountain hike, it occurred to me that the people of Hugo's book probably never experienced a hot shower----never. Victor may not have. I just took a shower for leisure. I stood in there realizing that only a tiny, minuscule fraction of the earth's inhabitants have been able on a regular basis to have this kind of pure pleasure.  My family didn't have a shower until the 60s not to mention the farm families of only 75 years ago.

It doesn't take just too much imagination to realize life only a couple of hundred years ago was not what it is today here amid our "civilization". The walk in the mountains we took today involved a vehicle ride of some 80 miles, all of it in comfort and the walk itself was for leisure.

As a result of this brief reflection, I found myself wondering about this activity of leisure. I found myself being stunned by the thought because of the many articles I read discussing the need to remove ourselves from this unsustainable "civilization" possibly to a position of an uncivilization. 

Having at younger times lived fairly close to the land, sometimes even in a teepee for months at a time, I figured it would be possible to reflect on that experience and try and remember pleasure and leisure. I went, "Ya there was pleasure and leisure but we in fact were backed up, one way or another, by the same old civilization". Yes, we slept on the ground wrapped in Hudson Bay blankets but for one reason or another we were not, at any time, infested with lice, nor ticks (sure, we had some), there was no fungal rot, no frost bit, no unhealed wounds. Still, I can imagine a native Americans having brief moments of pleasure and leisure.

Did Native peoples go for walks for leisurely purposes---to watch birds, to catch and release fish? 1750 in Europe was no gravy train. Do we live better now than royalty on the Renaissance? Our faces are not pocked with vile diseases. We have toilets.

Yet at times I read that hunter and gathering peoples, those who wandered about prior to "civilization" were more robust than moderns. But did they know leisure? It is very hard to believe they did, certainly not in the sense that we do----or if they knew it it was very fleeting, maybe something that occurred only a very few times in their lives. Maybe it was their dearest memories, a moment of warm sun of summer laying in the grass with a young woman--one who still had all of her teeth. Civilization has it's befits and in my age they are becoming visible---not long ago there were few survivors aged 69.