Re: Brent's latest post on relaxation: "My beef with relaxing".

Here's a relevant quote from Alan Watts. He's referencing scholastic learning but the principle applies. The grammar and structure is odd because this is actually a transcription of a lecture.

Do you know what Scholarship means? What a school means? The original meaning of a scholar? Leisure. We talked of a scholar and a gentleman because a gentleman was a person who had a private income, and he could afford to be a scholar. He didn't have to earn a living. Therefore he could study the classics and poetry and things like that. Today nothing is more busier than a school! They make you work work work work work because you have got to get through on schedule. They have expedited courses and you go to school so as to get a union card or PHD or something so that you can earn a living. So it's a whole contradiction of scholarship. Scholarship is to study everything that's unimportant. Not necessary for survival. All the charming irrelevancies of life. But you see the thing is this. If you don't have a room in your life for the playful, life's not worth living. All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. But if the only reason for which Jack plays is that he can work better afterwards he's not really playing. He's playing because it's good for him. He's not playing at all! To be a true scholar you have to cultivate an attitude to life where you're not trying to get anything out of it. You pick up a pebble on the beach and look at it. It's beautiful. Don't try to get a sermon out of it. Sermons and Stones and God and everything be damned. Just enjoy it. Don't feel that you've got to salve your conscience by saying that this is for the advancement of your aesthetic understanding. Enjoy the pebble. If you do that you'll become healthy. You become able to be a loving helpful human being. But if you can't do that... If you can only do things because somehow your going to get something out of it. You're a vulture." - Alan Watts, The Tao of Philosophy

The entire book (or audio lecture) is chock full of wonderfully insightful quotes like this. I highly recommend it and all other Alan Watts books to anyone.