Welcome (Back) to Campus

From the Desk of Chris Kuebler, Intern

This week at Cambridge House, we are welcoming students back to campus and are excited about the new year of programming ahead of us. As we leave the summer behind, the campus of William & Mary is once again teeming with students and faculty, and we look forward to seeing many new and familiar faces stop by Cambridge House for tea and good conversation. (And, as someone who has been living in this big, empty house during the summer months, this change of pace is a welcome one.)

With the beginning of each new semester comes the renewal of activity. In our university community, there will be renewed effort to learn and to teach, to study and to research, to labor over exams and papers, to share ideas with our peers, and to seek the wondrous truth in the sciences, humanities, and arts. Our academic setting is a blessing (although it may not seem it during the throes of finals week), and it affords students and faculty many opportunities to do work that is animating, whether this be through studying an interesting subject or leading a club or volunteering for a personal cause or mentoring students.

Yet, with this activity also comes the temptation to be busy for the sake of busyness. Let me illustrate with a concrete example (and a confession of personal guilt): It is common among William & Mary students to brag about getting meager sleep on account of those many opportunities just mentioned and to feel proud of oneself for toiling overlong. I have done so as a student. Ours is a culture of work, one that compels us to be unceasingly busy, as some vague notion of “productivity” hangs above our heads. As to why this is the case in our culture, I leave that to the philosophers and social theorists. But I suspect that this culture of work burdens many of us and, specifically, dispirits many students and faculty at our College in the academic work into which they have been called.

So, as something for you to take into the autumn semester, may I offer not new wisdom but an insight from Josef Pieper’s Leisure: The Basis of Culture, one of my favorite books I’ve read in the past year. Pieper insists upon the importance of leisure as a respite from our labor. For him, leisure does not entail mere diversion from work but instead an inward calm that repels busyness of the mind. Leisure is the attitude of peaceful openness to the world as it is (Leisure: The Basis of Culture, p. 46); it is the Divine affirmation on that first Sabbath, on which God rested and called the Creation “very good.” Indeed, “In leisure,” Pieper states, “man too celebrates the end of his work by allowing his inner eye to dwell for a while upon the reality of the Creation. He looks and he affirms: it is good” (p. 49). To escape busyness and be at leisure, we celebrate that which is, and we celebrate the Being who truly is by worshiping God.

Leisure, then, is to be cultivated as a religious habit, and not as a habit of active striving, but as a habit of opening oneself to God and His works by His grace. To do this, perhaps you may spend a few moments in quiet prayer when you wake up in the morning. Perhaps you may free yourself from homework or from using your phone on Sundays. Perhaps, at the height of midterm season, you may take a long walk through Matoaka Woods, simply beholding the beauty of trees. Whatever it is, I hope to invite you into intentional leisure this semester, even as the mountain of work that must be done ever grows.

Come by Cambridge House this semester during our Study Days—I’m here most days and am happy to chat with you over some coffee or tea.