The word “holiday” comes from Holy Day. The intent was to create a separate type of time, of which the Sabbath is one example. It seems to me this is a useful idea. I sometimes get into that other type of time, when I’m not preoccupied with problems, planning, and the endless ruminations that define so much of my personality. Sometimes I’m just there, enjoying the day.
When you get like that, you can see your normal life in relief, such that you have perspective. So often I think we live mechanically, but never really stop to think about it, or see where we could do things differently.
To this day Catholics recogize different types of time, and even though I suspect most Catholics don’t take it very seriously, most do at least nominally adhere to, as an example, Lent.
All religions of which I know have this feature. It is useful. Most of us just run like rats on a wheel. Eventually, we retire or die. We can do so much better, as individuals, and as a culture.
Some random thoughts after a long day in normal time.
Edit: I want to add to this.
I think back to some exceptional meals I’ve had–Muriel’s in New Orleans, the Oak Room in Louisville, a hotel in Mendocino–and I remember some details (the first time I had a really good steak au poivre, or duck, or foie gras), but what I mostly remember is a feeling, that of contented engagement, of sufficiency. We never seem sufficient, do we? At least, I never seem to. There is always something just over the horizon. In a round world, that means it never gets here.
Or some memorable musical moments. I will never forget being in a literally smoky old blues club in Memphis at 2am–needing to work the next day, but being unable to drag myself back to my hotel room–listening to a first rate band, playing what they wanted to play. After about 1am, it just doesn’t matter anymore. I can’t remember one song they played. But I remember feeling the room, feeling the crowd, and it was pleasant. It was another sort of time.
Or a walk I took on the beach in Myrtle Beach. We had an hour between one set of meetings and another. I didn’t know what to do, the sun was setting, and I figured I’d explore. As I did, something in the atmosphere entered me. There was a sense of peace. And you look at that, and wonder if you’re going crazy. If you never feel deep, profound peace, it appears to be a species of insanity. It is qualitatively different than anything else in your experience. I doubted it, and to some extent I remember fighting it as some sort of foreign influence I didn’t understand. Yet, in the end, I still remember that time, as a unique moment in my life I didn’t expect.
It seems to me that we process life as many discrete qualitatively distinct moments–both good and bad–filled with a muddying average-ness whose quality is, I suppose, perhaps influenced largely by our openness to qualitatively good moments, and where we choose to set our average, perceptually.
What is the Good Life? It seems to me we all need to answer this question in our own ways. It seems clear to me, though, that our environments are all filled to overflowing with the raw ingredients needed to build it, from any starting point (almost).
I probably need to reread “Flow”, and then see what he’s been up to since. I tend to shy away, in the long run, from metaphysical pessimists. It colors their work in subtle ways. Yet, when mechanically correct–and I view thoughts and the words that form them as operating on the level of machine–they can be useful.