The art of living

From Vaughn J. Featherstone’s talk A Wise and Understanding Heart, this quote by Wilfred Petersen:

“A master at the art of living makes no distinction between his work and his play, his labor and his leisure, his mind and his body, his education and his recreation, his love and his religion. He hardly knows which is which. He simply pursues with excellence what he is about and leaves others to determine whether he is working or playing. He, himself, always knows he is doing both.”

While I certainly don’t claim to be anything like a master at the art of living (yet), I often feel like my work and my play are combined into one. It’s what comes from living a whole, integrated life. I don’t think life’s meant to be chopped up into separate blocks.

As for the quote, I googled it and it doesn’t show up anywhere else with an attribution. Interesting. Someday it’d be nice to find out which book it came from…

So how does one get a chopped up life, and how does one really avoid it?

Darn, why do you have to ask hard questions? ;) Let’s see… One way is to run around with a butcher knife. Just kidding. :)

Um, I don’t have an answer to that. I’ll think about it and see if I can come up with one…

I loved this quote!

For me, I sometimes feel like my life is “chopped up” when I am compartmentalizing things: church, work, family, play, etc.

I do think grouping things is important for planning, because it helps me try to keep my life in balance as I try to gauge how much time and energy goes toward each area. But each is really a subset of my ultimate goal of becoming a more Christlike individual.

I’ve heard it said that structuring time, not content, is important. Somehow the message of this quote seems relevant to that idea.