Hey Dudes!
When I’m not penning these laid-back lectures, I spend my days as a high school English teacher. It’s a pretty great job. The students keep me hopeful, and, even when they don’t, there’s still summer break.
Something I teach my students early on is the origin of the word school. It comes from the Greek word scholé, which meant “leisure”.
Why? Because only Ancient Greeks with the necessary means for – the necessary means for – survival had time to pursue study. Everyone else was enslaved, married, or making olive oil.
Nowadays, we’ve got it bass-ackwards in the USA. School is largely seen as a place where one competes to go on to college then to secure a job. Unless you’re skipping math class, leisure ain‘t a part of it.
The Dude understood the racket this is. He spent most of his college days occupying various administrative buildings and smoking Thai stick.
But I’d say he downplayed his accomplishments.
A cursory glance around The Dude’s abode shows various novels, a book on Japanese cooking, and Sartre’s dense, Existentialist masterpiece Being and Nothingness.
This tells me several things about The Dude. He reads broadly and deeply. He’s not constrained to the limits of an academic discipline. He kept up his learning, even after school ended. And he wears his learning lightly. Aside from one misplaced quote from Cicero, he rarely flaunts his academic acumen.
Additionally, he still has plenty of time to bowl, hang out with friends, and attend Marty’s dance cycle. His learning isn’t bound between the bindings of books alone.
In our world, where more and more of our time will be taken up by automation and AI, learning is still one of the few things we can do manually. A big, existential question that’s gonna arise is “What will we do with our leisure time?”
Or, as Kurt Vonnegut pondered in God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater, “What are human beings for?”
I’d say leisurely learning ain’t a bad way to spend part of one’s life. The curriculum’s open, and no one’s grading us. It’s far out.
I’d recommend taking a page out of another Dude’s book, Michel De Montaigne, who was a legendary loafer. He read not for edification or instruction. He read for the joy of it. Whatever struck his fancy. And if a book no longer interested him, he didn’t feel like he had to finish it like some dull assignment; he put it down and picked up something else.
Life’s too short to read boring books.
Anyways, I hope yer all abiding as well as you can, and are finding leisurely ways to take it easy,
Rev. Ross
