If I had to spend six out of seven days working from sunrise to sunset, I would want to spend my one day off laying back and resting up for another arduous week. Like me, many lavish this passive approach to rest and leisure to reward themselves for their industry.

Obviously, rest is important especially after a long week/term or semester of hard work. However, if at the end of everything you do not feel rejuvenated or the urge to attain the self-actualization that you have little time for during the workweek then what would be the essence of rest? The problem is that most people spend their leisure time passively in activities that sap their break, leaving them even more fatigued.

When confronted with this reality, our instinct is to blame the matter on not having enough time to do anything of merit. Earlier last month, the holiday period seemed long and promising to both holiday makers and teachers but time has a vicious habit of slipping through our fingers. The reality is that it’s almost a month since schools closed for holidays but most of us have nothing to show for how we have spent it. This could be greatly attributed to our passive leisure habits.

Televisions, computers and cell phones have become the greatest consumers of our time even though they don’t give us as much pleasure and are associated with boredom, a low level of concentration, a low level of potency, lack of clarity of thought and lack of flow. Phones get you started on single chats that graduate to several open chats for hours. The Television equally presents us with a trail of soaps and movies that keep us glued but only half consciously as we lapse to slumber land.

Interestingly, people tend to squander more than 14 hours a week in front of their TV screens, yet spend significantly less time on the activities they themselves consider as most pleasurable, like socializing and outdoor activities. All the same, instead of grumbling over the health dangers and the mental incapacities television watching gradually exposes us to, it is better to explore the value of active leisure.

The fact is that passivity breeds more passivity, and once you do anything passive, all you want to do is continue doing that, or doing something else that requires little energy or involvement. On the other hand, even when you are feeling exhausted, if you do something active you usually feel energized right away. It is therefore important to spend the leisure time actively involved in fruitful activities. Like Russell Wallace, a British naturalist and an explorer once observed: ‘To be able to fill leisure intelligently is the last product of civilization, and at present very few people have reached that level’.

It would be wise to spend the rest of this holiday involved in low-impact physical activities like walking and yoga, which expend little energy and have little contact or in high-impact activities such as kick-boxing and soccer that consume much energy and are competitive depending on your preference. If you don’t like going physical, you can go for active leisure activities which involve almost no physical activity, but do require a substantial mental effort, such as playing chess, reading a book or painting a picture.

The greatest predicament of time lies not in the amount of time available, not even in having to manage it successfully in order to squeeze out an extra hour of a day, but in learning how to balance time in such a way that it contributes to our well-being. Instead of greatly overestimating the amount of time we spend working and underestimating how much free time we have, we should dedicate our free time to active and rejuvenating activities.

The writer is a lecturer at The Adventist University of Central Africa.