‘Oh the summer time is comin’

And the leaves are sweetly bloomin’

And the wild mountain thyme

Grows around the bloomin' heather ...’

SUMMER is emerging from behind the dark screen of winter, a bit drippy and battered from the ravages of a relentlessly wet period that masqueraded as a distinct season. The end of exams is but a few lines away, the long summer holidays about to begin. For some, though, the prospect of leisure – whether two weeks annual leave or an eight-week school break – hangs over them like a darkening sky, ominously bearing the deadly fruits of the enemies of productivity: boredom and inactivity. Harassed and creatively challenged, parents scramble to devise an alternative timetable of "summer leisure activities". God forbid that we should wander off piste and start to wonder about the meaning of life. Best to keep to the timetable, keep occupied, leave no moment vulnerable to inquiry, to mind-wandering.

In a culture where work is God, work is love, work is the justifier of our very being, the notion of leisure, let alone the practice of it, has become distorted, shabbied under the cold examination light of workaholism. The ancient Greeks had a much better grasp of the significance of leisure. The origins of the word in Greek (then Latin) is "scola" ("school" in English). For the ancients, leisure was both space and place for contemplation on the meaning of life (as opposed to the "function" of life). A meditative process to enhance our openness to the nature of our existence, our oneness with the nature of all things. For the ancient Greeks, leisure was not the absence of work, but more the rudiment for living a meaningful and satisfying life through reflection and inquiry. As essential as the food we eat, the air we breathe.

Modern leisure has come a long way since then. Hijacked by the industrial revolution, leisure became something that was slotted into a couple of days per year when the worker bees were permitted to stroll around the city parks, so generously gifted to them by the great and the good. These leisure activities were, naturally, unpaid, just like many of those on the modern-day equivalent of "zero-hours" contracts. Now, leisure is seen merely as the absence of productivity, reduced to a politically-correct trope of "work/life balance". Leisure is now a bike, a tracksuit, a spin in Lycra-city at your local gym. Leisure is time off to recover and repair in order to get back on your bike and cycle to work. Leisure is industry.

How many of us use work as a defence against solitude, an avoidance tactic for tackling the tricky question of “Why am I alive? What is the purpose of life and living? Does anything really matter?” We must all, surely, have such questions in our orbit, even if we choose not to reel them in. There are few of us privileged to work in an area where we are paid to think about the meaning of life. Art and literature come easily to mind. But how many people do you know who earn their living from creating art or writing novels?

Instead, most of us, lured and coerced into the hegemony of the daily crust, see leisure as a kind of indulgence, amoral idleness or, more usually, a time to keep fit and so live longer. Quantity beats quality to the finishing line every time. The notion of fertile solitude where we allow our minds to wander, to contemplate and enrich our being by not doing, is becoming increasingly taboo. When your colleagues gather round the kettle at work on a Monday morning and ask what you did at the weekend, we feel apologetic about saying: "Oh, nothing much, really." Then comes the comparative shame when they tell you that they ran 10K, went to the cinema, made cupcakes and re-tiled their bathroom. And then went to the gym again. Somehow your walk around the botanic gardens, culminating in an hour or so of unburdened contemplation on a nice old wooden bench, doesn’t quite cut it compared to their cornucopia of leisure activities.

As an antidote to the shame of leisure inactivity, it’s worth reminding ourselves that from Aristotle to the present day, the most important human achievements and scientific breakthroughs are sparked in moments of contemplation and stillness. Without such moments, we become strangers to ourselves, to others, and to the very world in which we find ourselves.