A master in the art of living draws no sharp distinction between his work and his play; his labor and his leisure; his mind and his body; his education and his recreation. He hardly knows which is which. He simply pursues his vision of excellence through whatever he is doing, and leaves others to determine whether he is working or playing. To himself, he always appears to be doing both.

Lawrence Pearsall Jacks, in “Education through Recreation”, 1932

I’ve thought that the idea that we’re supposed to enjoy our work is a relatively new one.

I doubt that anybody thought that going down a coal mine for 12hrs a day was fun, or even that it was supposed to be fun. I doubt anybody thinks it’s fun now.

The fact that some of us are able to enjoy our work without breaking our back or getting cancer seems both fairly recent phenomenon in the evolution of our society, and a rare privilege.

Now what I think Jacks is alluding to is the idea that we can take small steps to engineer our lives toward a direction which we ourselves deem desirable. The degree of success in this kind of lifestyle engineering will vary, and will involve a great deal of luck at the extremity, but the very act of being purposeful about it can in itself engender a very desirable feeling – the feeling that we are bringing our lives under our influence rather than being shuttled along as life happens to us.

At the extremes we might imagine somebody like Rick Reuben absorbed on somebodies new album, unable to distinguish a sharp line between whether he were working or playing.

But what about all of us who aren’t right on the edge of the bell curve?

Let’s imagine a copywriter, and let’s imagine somebody came in and saw her writing something. Is she writing something for a new campaign for her work? Is she writing something for her new book as her play. She might be ‘working’ on her book and ‘playing around’ with ideas for the campaign. If she were, to use Jacks turn of phrase “a master at the art of living”, it wouldn’t be possible to tell if she were working or playing, and to herself it would feel like she were doing both.

But Jacks doesn’t only refer to one sphere; work and play.

He mentions labour and leisure; this past Sunday a group of people who ride the local mountain bike trails went out to build and and repair the tracks. Some select messages from the WhatsApp group this morning…

Thanks guys, it was a good one. Now just waiting for the feeling in my glutes to return.

So who else woke up like a pangolin and did the t-Rex walk?

Was a absolute pleasure building trails with you. Looking forward to the next group build.

Clearly there was a lot of labour involved, or was that leisure time? Jacks makes the claim that “a master in the art of living draws no sharp distinction”

I chose to give up television in the evenings in favour of learning guitar; education or recreation? No sharp distinction.

Jacks is describing an end state, an ideal state, not one that’s instantly attainable. He’s describing a master in the art of living. But we don’t start out as masters. Mastery is the last step, not the first.

So what’s the first step?

Jacks asks us to think about living as an art. We can choose to take up an art, we can practice an art, and can get better at an art. We can strum the guitar badly, and the process will be difficult and fun. And then we can do it again, and again, and we’ll get better.

Next Jacks next asks us to accept that mastery of this art requires living in a way that draws no sharp distinction between our various forms of work, and our various forms of play, and we have to ask ourselves if we accept that definition of mastery?

I think the merit of such a view is that it might increase the amount of time that we spend living in a desirable state of consciousness. If we accept this to be a good thing.

So if we accept the idea that living is an art, and that we can improve our skill at it, and that mastery of that skill is be engaged in endeavours in which there is no sharp distinction between work and play, then the next question might be, “How?”

First we might think of any things we currently do where the distinction between work and play is not sharp. Can we expand the size of those pockets, do more of those things?

Can we increase the number of those pockets? Find other areas where there currently isn’t an overlap between work and play, his labour and leisure, education and recreation and introduce something to create an overlap?

To the extent that we’re able to maximise the amount of time spent in the ‘no distinction’ zone, we might likewise be maximising the time spent in desirable states of consciousness and moving closer toward ‘mastery of the art of living’.