ABSTRACT
In the last chapter, we started an intellectual journey that showed us that if the study of leisure seems at first glance like a single world-wide effort, it is really a progression of rivalries. To paraphrase and extend what Harvie Ferguson (2009: 10) recently said about doing sociology, we also took the first step in the process of reflecting on the variety and ambiguity of actual human experience; not with the aim of tidying-up the confusion emanating from these rivalries, eliminating their contradictions and setting out what leisure should mean, but trying to grasp and understand that complexity as part of the larger task of understanding the world itself, which as Northrop Frye (1963) says, ‘never speaks unless we take the time to listen in leisure’. Now that we have a working definition of leisure, we need to outline the key leisure concepts, which suggests to me that we are about to take the next step on an intellectual journey, where we will not only learn a bit more about the larger task of understanding the world itself, but we might also begin to realize what it means to make our own free and liberated relation to the variety and ambiguity of actual human experience, which is desirable and rewarding in and for itself as a means towards our own personal fulfilment, but also dignity for the self and others.
