Month: February 2021

An activity I did with my classes (both at the university and for public presentations) was to ask folks to make a list of “20 Things I Love to Do.” Not everyone could come up with 20, but we would discuss dimensions of their activities such as whether they were done outside/inside, alone/with others, cost money, and further, whether the “thing” would be considered leisure or not. Almost all their responses were considered leisure. I made the point that most things that were personally important and meaningful were considered leisure.

I suggested that I have never heard anyone on their deathbed indicating that they wished they had worked harder or longer. When people reflect on their lives, they value the relationships and the activities they enjoyed. They value experiences in their lives that brought them warm playful memories and made them smile.

I view the world through a leisure lens. Obviously, I am biased as I did research about leisure for over 45 years and I view the world in terms of how any event influences individual and community leisure and well-being. I make no apologies for this worldview because I believe that leisure is what makes life worth living. I do not mean that I am only interested in hedonism, although that can be an outcome of leisure. I advocate that leisure is an inherent right, responsibility, privilege, and entitlement that defines who each of us is, and the quality of our communities.

I was ingrained with a work ethic by my rural upbringing. A reason I became interested in studying leisure was because I watched how hard everyone around me worked, and it seemed to me there had to be more to life. Leisure complements economic or socially necessary work and offers people a means for growth and self-expression in their lives.

As my colleague Dan Dustin suggests, life is meaningful not because of a work ethic, but because of a worth ethic that leisure belies. Yet, the idea of leisure is often downplayed and discounted.

Leisure is ubiquitous. Most people know what it is and know the feeling of not having it, but defining it is elusive. One of the women I interviewed for a research project once told me that she did not want to define leisure, she wanted to FIND it.

A classical notion of leisure is free time. However, little time is totally free of obligations. Some people have too much free time (e.g., unemployed people) and it isn’t leisure for them. Another common definition is leisure as activity. Many leisure activities exist but what is leisure for me may not be for you. For example, many people enjoy bowling. Not me. I would never consider it leisure.

I understand leisure best as a state of mind, a personal experience usually associated with free choice and opportunities for self-expression, joy, play, and/or personal development. People know when they are having these experiences and seek them. Leisure is central to a life well lived.

Although leisure offers opportunities for enjoyment, leisure is not always good since it can be an avenue for injury to self or others. Nothing is good without recognizing the responsibility associated with any behavior–the worth ethic.

My appreciation of leisure continues to evolve. Since I no longer study leisure with empirical data, I have more time existentially to experience it. Everyone deserves leisure whether it is extended periods of time away from the everyday routine, or minute vacations where one simply takes a deep breath and enjoys the beauty of the moment. I find minute vacations in cuddling with my kitties or reminiscing from photos of vacations with friends. Regardless of what you call it, or how you define it, I hope people never have a problem listing 20 things they love to do.

I feel a sense of my place, like I am home, whenever I am in Rocky Mountain National Park whether on high tundra landscapes with wildflowers oscillating in the wind, along mountain streams that sprint toward lakes and valleys, high on mountains with 360-degree views, walking in lightly falling snow, or encountering living creatures such as moose, snowshoe hares, or scurrying chipmunks.

I think about the meanings of place often. Space and place are not the same as scholars have written. Space is a physical location that may or may not have meaning. A place is a space where meaning has been imbued by an individual. A place can be where your soul thrives. According to Wendell Berry, place and identity are closely related. He suggested that if you do not know where you are, you do not know who you are.

In thinking about my experiencing the Park, I recently saw reference to sense of place as the landscape of the soul, and I think that explains my affinity for this Park. I lived for 27 years in North Carolina and had a productive career with great friends and colleagues. But the landscape of North Carolina never felt like home to me. Whenever I was in the high snow-covered mountains and in open spaces, I felt I was home.

Other places have had important meanings for me. One is the farm where I grew up. I didn’t have the words to describe at the time what it felt like to be in the outdoors, to play in the creek (crick), to search for the wild critters, and to smell the earth, but I knew I resonated with it deeply. Iowa is a beautiful land and the rolling sand hills of Eastern Iowa will always be a geography of my heart. It was home for me for my formative years, but things change and so did my identity with the land.

Another consideration for me is how place can relate to spiritual senses about a setting. I experienced a strong sense of place in Wisconsin when I spent time at Picnic Point. The path, the wind singing through the trees, and Mendota Lake lapping on the shore always gave me the impression that I had visited it many times before, perhaps in previous lives. This place pulled me strongly, but I have not returned for many years. It is a memory in my soul.

Finally, some places I have never been but feel a deep connection such as the Arctic Wildlife Refuge. Knowing something about an area gives me the opportunity to care intensely even though I may never experience it directly. Spending time in a space may make it a special place but having a context about the value of its existence provides me with an affinity for a specific environment.

I have visited many spaces around the world. It is not only the physical topography but also the people and cultures that make environments special. On a day-to-day basis, however, I have never felt a stronger connection to my soul than the landscape of the places where I now wander in the mountains and the privilege I have to experience deep engagement in what the Park has to offer every day, every season.

Four years ago, I made a New Year’s resolution to be consciously grateful. Initially I kept a little box with scraps of paper and pen next to my toothpaste holder and jotted a couple notes each evening before I went to bed about what I was thankful for that day. After a few weeks, I incorporated my gratitude into a few sentences at the end of each of my morning journal entries.

These years have resulted in heaps of thankfulness. At first it was easy to write ideas as the universe was open to me. Many appreciations were overtly obvious such as colorful morning sunrises and snow-capped mountains.

Over time, however, I began challenging myself to be more mindful and acknowledge the blessings that I often took for granted. I looked for little moments that made me smile each day. Gratitude jottings helped me pause and think about the day and what was unique and/or special such as juicy oranges and a heartfelt thank you from a stranger.

As I peruse my gratitude notes over the past years, I can identify several themes including nature, animals, people, privilege, and food. Here are a few examples:

Nature

• The full moon rising on a cold winter evening
• City parks full of active people
• Warm days in February
• Volunteering in Rocky Mountain National Park
• Watching approaching thunderstorms
• Sunshine on my shoulders

Animals

• A cuddly brown tabby cat sitting on my lap
  • People dedicated to protecting wild and domestic animals
  • The quizzical looks and sweet mews of elk calves as they follow their moms around in late spring
  • A marmot oblivious to the rest of the world nibbling on yellow flowers
  • Geese that land gracefully flat-footed on Lake Estes

People

• Martin Luther King, Jr.’s dream
  • People who make me laugh
  • Dedicated co-volunteers who care deeply about the environment
  • Parents who love(d) me unconditionally
  • The kindred spirits in my writing group
  • Kind and generous friends who offered boundless help after my shoulder surgery

Privilege

• A car that gets me where I want to go
• A warm shower after a cold day volunteering at Bear Lake
• Christmas lights all over our little mountain town
• Asthma medicine that helps me breathe better
• The rights that I have and the responsibilities that go along with those rights

Food

• A little piece of chocolate after dinner
  • A holiday feast with friends
  • White pizza
  • Sticky, gooey cinnamon rolls
  • Rich dark coffee with cream

My gratitude journal enables me to reflect on and appreciate the good things each day. It keeps me grounded in the blessed life I live and the big and little moments that feed my soul.

I am especially grateful today that I got my second coronavirus vaccine. I am beholden to the researchers, manufacturers, distributors, health professionals, and other essential workers who have made this possible. I will be even more thankful when everyone in the world has access to the vaccine. My gratitude is especially huge and visible today, and it reminds me to continue to express my thankfulness with every opportunity I get.

A month after I retired and moved to Colorado, I filled out a survey. At the end it asked my occupation. The last category just before other was retired. For the first time in all the hecticness of leaving my job and moving across the country, I was directly confronted with acknowledging I am retired.

I thought objectively about retirement and planned it for years. I worked with a trusted financial advisor who guided me in preparing to have enough money to retire. Her assessment was, “You will be fine, Karla, just don’t go crazy.” I was a leisure researcher and had written about aging and retirement. I loved being a professor, but I also did not want to be one of those people who “stayed too long.” I wanted to leave when I still felt productive. I had watched both of my parents retire and continue lives that were meaningful to them and their communities. I also had been thinking for almost 50 years about wanting to live in Colorado to be near the mountains that fed my soul and offered me a sense of place.

I never thought, however, about what it would feel like to be retired and to check a box that marked my new identity. Retirement was now an emotional reality and I had to confront my new actuality.

Somewhere along the path of pondering retirement, someone told me that the most successful retirement was about “going to” something new and not “going away” or escaping from life of the past. In living retirement as moving toward something, I embrace how my friend, Linda Erceg, described retirement as an encore performance.

Music, sports, volunteering, writing, and outdoor adventures are dear to me. Even though I worked diligently in my professional career, I was also passionate about my social and recreation activities. My life was heavily scheduled so I could get everything done.  

What I had never done, however, was sit still and just relax. I defined myself as a human doing. Retirement meant putting my energy in other ways besides working, which had been far more joyous than drudgery.

The Covid-19 pandemic taught me more about slowing down than I had learned about retirement up to that point. I started to appreciate the mental energy that I could decrease. When working, I seldom shut my brain off. I was continually thinking about what I needed to do the next day, how I could have done better in teaching, or what more I needed to do to finish a research article. In retirement, I can do something like volunteering and then go home and not think about it anymore. Retirement, and the forced slowdown from the pandemic, has helped me center on living in the moment rather than evaluating the past or always planning for the near future.

A professional colleague, Kathy O’Keefe, sent me a note upon hearing that I was going to retire:

 “Most of us in recreation might have an easier time viewing retirement as walking toward opportunities rather than away from our past. Someone asked me what I want from this next period of life, and I think it’s contemplation, engagement in all kinds of activities and adventurous experiences, deepening of relationships, encounters with the transcendent, and a whole lot of laughs. I wish all that for you too.”

I am making my encore performance all those things. My wish is that others can experience their later life in a similar way.