The leisure industry – encompassing cultural and natural heritage sites, travel, sport, entertainment and leisure education – is the fastest growing industry in the world and impacts on people, places and cultures. Although we often take this area of our lives for granted, leisure activities are increasingly important in terms of determining the quality of people’s lives. Whether we use our free time in beneficial, destructive or passive ways is likely to be one of the defining features of future societies.

While consumerism tempts us to spend money on playful, transitory experiences, many people are using their leisure time to search for the sense of meaning and authenticity they find lacking in other parts of their lives.

Leisure Studies offers a critical, theoretical perspective for exploring these issues with direct relevance to important social and cultural issues in contemporary society. It’s an exciting and rapidly evolving area of study with relevance to many other disciplinary areas.

Unresolved things

All of us from time to time find ourselves uninspired, unmotivated or both! In times like this we tend to procrastinate and our activity often comes to a grinding halt. There are things we want to achieve, but they’re just not happening for us. There are some big tasks to complete,  but we just can’t get into it. Or perhaps it’s that something we are looking for that’s not happening as quickly as we would like. All of those things we don’t complete create dissonance in our lives.

A little voice is crying out for resolution. The more unresolved things we have in our lives, the less room there is for creative thought. We need to be moving in order to get somewhere. We need to take action to find the solution to a problem that was preventing us from finishing our business. We need to be in motion to bring resolution into our lives. We have to create a space and within that space we’ll find new ideas and the solutions.

What a noisy campus!

One of my biggest pet peeves about being up on campus is the lack of peace and quiet. This supposedly quite and calm environment is rarely stay peaceful. Some ignorant students  are not realizing how disruptive noise they make when they speaking, laughing,  and shouting loudly. Too many times have I been teaching when a group of students stand outside my class and start  a conversation or making jokes in a aggravated and obnoxious tone. It’s a total annoyance! Strangely enough, there is lack of concern about this excessive noise. It’s already taken for granted.

What makes you laugh?

~ Incongruity: When we see or hear something incongruous, we are surprised into laughter, as a sort of relief.

~ Superiority: Those who tell us funny stories about their own foibles – or those of others – help listeners feel momentarily superior to the jokester or to the people who’ve been made the butt of the joke.

~ The Pattern of Three: Comedians have long believed that jokes work best in a pattern of three parts. Offer two straightforward examples and then a third one to shatter the pattern.

V. S. Ramachandran, in Phantoms in the Brain, wrote, “The main purpose of laughter might be to allow the individual to alert others in the social group that the detected anomaly is nothing to worry about.”

(source: http://sayitbetter.typepad.com)

The Quest

Uncertainty, in the presence of vivid hopes and fears, is painful, but must be endured if we wish to live without the support of comforting fairy tales.