Stillness Is the Key by Ryan Holiday

Pieper said that leisure was like saying a prayer before bed. It
might help you go to sleep—just as leisure might help you get better
at your job—but that can’t be the point.
Many people find relief in strenuous exercise. Sure, it might make
them stronger at work, but that’s not why they do it. It’s meditative
to put the body in motion and direct our mental efforts at conquering
our physical limitations. The repetition of a long swim, the challenge
of lifting heavy weights, the breathlessness of a sprint—there is a
cleansing experience, even if it is accompanied by suffering. It’s a
wonderful feeling there, right before the sweat breaks, when we can
feel ourselves working the stress up from the deep recesses of our
soul and our conscious mind and then out of the body.
“If an action tires your body but puts your heart at ease,” Xunzi
said, “do it.” There is a reason philosophers in the West often trained
in wrestling and boxing, while philosophers in the East trained in
martial arts. These are not easy activities, and if you’re not present
while you do them, you’ll get your ass kicked.
The point isn’t to simply fill the hours or distract the mind.
Rather, it’s to engage a pursuit that simultaneously challenges and
relaxes us. Students observed that in his leisure moments, Confucius
was “composed and yet fully at ease.” (He was also said to be very
skilled at “menial” tasks.) That’s the idea. It’s an opportunity to
practice and embody stillness but in another context.
It’s in this leisure, Ovid observed, that “we reveal what kind of
people we are.”
Assembling a puzzle, struggling with a guitar lesson, sitting on a
quiet morning in a hunting blind, steadying a rifle or a bow while we
wait for a deer, ladling soup in a homeless shelter. Our bodies are
busy, but our minds are open. Our hearts too.
Of course, leisure can easily become an escape, but the second
that happens it’s not leisure anymore. When we take something
relaxing and turn it into a compulsion, it’s not leisure, because we’re
no longer choosing it.
There is no stillness in that.
While we don’t want our leisure to become work, we do have to
work to make time for them. “For me,” Nixon wrote in his memoir,
“it is often harder to be away from the job than to be working at it.”