I must admit that I do not take leisure enough. I have some deep-set puritan work ethics that I have only recently sought to free myself from, in large part due to the work of people like Hodgkinson and Josef Pieper. But I am trying to work at being idle to take things more slowly and be more productive. 

You see leisure and idleness are not the opposites of productivity—they are, in fact, its complements. We often fill our lives with too much work, with too many activities to have the time to be truly creative and productive. And this leads to Hodgkinson's point about the productive home. If we make our money outside of the home and spend it outside of the home rather than saving it, then we become slaves to our things and the debts we took on to pay for those things. Since the industrial revolution, there has been a march to make production something that happens in factories and the home to be merely the center of consumption. 

But what if we turned things around and made the home productive? What if we worked less and therefore had the time to be productive? In Peter Singer and Jim Mason's book The Ethics of What we Eat,  they interview a couple who try to eat as ethical omnivores. One quote struck me: "I work so much that I need that convenience,” says Mary Ann Masarech on why she chooses the foods she does. “If I had more time on my hands, I'd probably make better ethical choices, but I would have to go out of my way, which I can't do much of right now."

Why work so much that it compromises your ethics, settling for an ethical convenience rather than what is truly good?  It’s a problem I face all too often, and yet when I see it on the page it seems so absurd. Why not slow down, take more time, live in proportion to time rather than pack time full?

This past weekend I took a step toward that goal. My girlfriend came over for the day and we cooked a great deal of food: scones from scratch, naan bread, lentil stew. And along with cooking the meals for a day, we made a wheel of cheddar that is drying on a rack in my kitchen as I write, and hauled rocks and compost from my farm to my house to begin work on a new herbal tea operation I am planning for the summer. It was a slow day, yet we made enough food for a week. But it didn't feel like work—it felt like idle pleasure. I used to cook and dig in the dirt for fun as a child, and I was having fun at those same things again.