[...] while I was engrossed in the task of washing the cutlery and then the plastic containers and then the plates, I made my discovery: namely that this, and nothing else, was the leisure I needed. I realised that leisure doesn’t have to mean sitting in an armchair and waiting tensely for the vague anxiety to come. That the vague anxiety will come of its own accord, when it has to, if it has to. I’d been trying to impose a particular state of mind on myself, and that’s where I was going wrong. It’s fine to sit in one armchair to rest or in another armchair to read, when you feel like it, when it’s necessary. But if you do it out of duty, in order to begin a project like the one covered by this grant, it’s not leisure. It’s not even the pursuit of leisure. Rather, the pursuit of leisure turns into work, or indeed business, and business is the very opposite of leisure. Many years ago, a friend pointed out that the word ‘business’ is actually referring to being busy, to busy-ness. Leisure, i.e. not being busy, isn’t what I thought it was – to be honest, I didn’t think much about what it was, I just went on behaving in that misguided way. What I mean is that leisure doesn’t have its own substance, it’s not an end in itself. It’s nothing: leisure is an attitude of the soul, and it can accompany any kind of activity. It’s not the contemplation of the void, let alone the void itself; you could say it’s a way of being. Sitting in an armchair doing nothing isn’t necessarily leisure, and washing the dishes can be leisure, if you have the right attitude. The right attitude, when it comes to washing the dishes, is washing the dishes as if it were the most important thing in the world. Not as if it were; it is the most important thing, like anything else I might have been doing at that moment, and it’s leisure insofar as what I’m doing leaves my mind clear and unattached, unattached to anything other than my contemplation of the thing I’m doing. And that thing shouldn’t be done for the purpose of any kind of business, because that ruins everything. I wash the dishes without wanting to be doing anything else, taking my time. And after washing the dishes I get the little yoghurt jars ready and plug in the yoghurt-maker. It’s the kind of thing I always do, only at that moment I was being leisurely about it, because my mind wasn’t on any kind of business, because I didn’t want to be doing anything else instead, because I was having fun doing what I was doing. That’s leisure, or at least it’s the leisure I need. My workshops aren’t leisure because their purpose relates to business, however enjoyable they might be and however much they move my spirit. They’re an activity with a timetable and a purpose. They’re not leisure, and they always upset my nerves. Last night, however, washing the dishes brought peace to my spirit and showed me the path to follow. And I’ll try to follow it.