Leisure is an attitude of mind and a condition of the soul that fosters a capacity to receive the reality of the world.

Joseph Pieper

It’s Saturday morning. It’s 11 degrees celsius (51F), but the concrete grey sky and whipping winds make it feel close to zero. A few stragglers walk past me, scuffing their heels as if to say ‘isn’t this a nasty morning?’

I would tend to agree. I’ve just picked up my coffee and I’m about to turn down my street to walk home. I’m standing on a street corner, bracing against the wind and I glance up across the road.

It’s something I’ve never done, and will never be able to do again. To stare at this old boot repair stop. This bridge over train tracks. These shrubs. Holding this coffee. Right at this moment. And it’s not easy.

Because this particular intersection, it’s so banal to me it’s almost hard to do.

Because there’s nothing interesting there. 

I’m both familiar with it, and tired of it at the same time. First impressions stick. I saw these shops, this bit of road, this dirty sidewalk once, and I knew it wasn’t worth my attention. 

And so it was.

It made me think. If I have make up my mind so quickly about this place, I likely do the same for everything else I register with my eyeballs. 

Try it out. Look at something you perceive to be ‘nice’. A bright red apple is pretty universally liked. Maybe you notice some thoughts naturally come to mind. Nice, little, yum, crunchy. These are basic value judgements. It’s a little word cluster. Morphed together it forms a sort of ‘vibe’ of that thing you’re looking at.

Two people look at a church. One word cluster ‘god, epic, holy, sacred, safe’, the other ‘junk, old, history, old people, boring’. Two word clusters. Two different churches are seen.

Conversely, a row of trash cans on the street: Dirty, plastic, gross, smell, ugly. 

And that’s what they look like. Don’t they? At least that’s how they look to me.

Back to that street corner. Conscious of my little value descriptions, ‘concrete, grey, ugly, empty, sparse, boring’, I push myself to continue looking and let the value judgements drift off into the distance. Not much changes. But every cell in my body wants to move on, to ignore what I’m seeing. I’ve seen it so many times before. Another word drifts in: ‘waste of time’. But my eyes are content to move around and they rest on a little green electrical box. It’s an interesting colour and shape. And nearby, a similarly green shrub, about a foot high. More shrubs. A glimpse of a pastel coloured mural behind a car. The dull shine of a wet rubber. 

It’s all there. There’s probably a lot more there too. 

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We need the ability to critically assess the world around us. In many ways, we are critical assessment machines. Instead of a body with eyes, we are eyes with a ton of CPU and some moving apparatus attached.

But when we allow our minds to run wild with fearful stories, harsh judgements and defensive attitudes, we start to lose touch with reality.