I shouldn’t be writing this. I am on vacation and just about to backpack to my favorite place in the universe, a place called Young Lake, seven miles by trail from Tuolumne Meadows in California’s Yosemite National Park. The High Sierra has been, since my childhood, the place I feel closest to the supreme mystery of the universe – call it God, the Great Spirit or whatever. At Young Lake, my phone won’t work, there will be no internet connection, and I will rest.
For years, as a leader of Take Back Your Time (www.timeday.org) I’ve encouraged everyone to rest enough and to be sure to take vacations. For those who don’t even get them, I, and my organization, have been fighting to make vacations mandatory for all American workers, as they are in every other rich country and all but about five countries in the world – one of which is the United States. We helped Rep. Alan Grayson of (D-Fla.) with his Paid Vacation Act of 2009, which, sadly, went nowhere. He has since re-introduced it, but in a country where “workaholism” is venerated, it stands little chance.
I was also happy to see that Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) has introduced a similar bill in the Senate. Take Back Your Time also helped State Rep. Gael Tarleton (D-36th-Seattle) with a paid vacation bill in the Washington state legislature, which also has not yet passed, and we are working with Seattle City Council member Nick Licata to introduce one in that city. If it passes, it would make Seattle, recently immortalized in a New York Times article as the home of the notoriously anti-work-life-balance Amazon corporation, the first in the country to require vacation for workers.
With the Pope on our side
It seems that, in our quixotic quest for mandatory vacation benefits, we now have an ally in a high place. He is a man of God, and perhaps the most famous religious leader in the world. Pope Francis believes that human happiness depends on sufficient time to rest and play. As he points out, we need “a healthy sense of leisure.”
Together with a culture of work, there must be a culture of leisure as gratification. To put it another way: people who work must take the time to relax, to be with their families, to enjoy themselves, read, listen to music, play a sport. The pleasures of art, literature and playing together with children have been lost…Consumerism has brought us anxiety and stress, causing people to lose a healthy culture of leisure. Their time is swallowed up so people can’t share it with anyone.
In expressing such views, Pope Francis is right in line with Catholic Social Teaching. A 1986 encyclical L=letter from America’s Catholic Bishops also called for a shorter workweek and more time for leisure. In the 1930, the Monsignor John Ryan, a leading Catholic philosopher, argued that the time had come to begin using America’s productivity for leisure time instead of for producing more stuff. In various places in the Bible, Jesus admonishes his disciples for not taking time to rest. And the Pope’s namesake, Francis of Assisi, urged his followers to slow down and savor nature’s beauty.
Time, God and the Pope
By John de Graaf