Lesuire Concepte

Week 1

The focus for this week's lecture was to determine how important leisure to me.

The 3 major requisites are:

A freedom of choice, intrinsic motivation, and it need to be enjoyable in anticipation participation or in recollection.

1. After reading the notes and lecture, it is easy to find that as an important aspect for leisure, can leisure be simple defined as "non-work" is an issue for people. According to Kelly (1972, p 50-62), leisure is non-work, but not all non-work can be considered leisure. Therefore, the freedom of choice is the "the activity or non-activity needs to be freely chosen". Leisure to me is like the free time to be used according to my own judgment or choice (Brightbill, 1960, p4) such as the time away from the school, job and any other things that I have to deal with. During this period, more personal activity can be taken by own ideas.

2. The most important is those activities are enjoyable to me which meet the one of the critical components of leisure - enjoyable. Have some reading, play with friends and chat with them, even learn something special such as drawing although that is really difficult for me. I really hate to repeat a single thing again and again however I still enjoyed every minutes to draw ever line of picture as I freely chose to do that. When I have a busy day, all I have done is just finished the things I have to face, still the drawing is not the daily task for me. However for other people, this may not be a good way to relax. Therefore leisure is really different for different people. Because it s not from external sources, enjoyable either in anticipation, participation or recollection (Howat & Murray, 2005).

3. Another important part of leisure to me is the activities do by free time can improve ourselves and stimulate us from within ourselves and not from external sources. Like have camp for some people and the drawing to me, they may not get paid or receiving praise or a certificate of participation from those activities, however this about the feeling getting inside. Like Godbey (1985, p9) said that the leisure is living in relative freedom from the external compulsive forces of one's culture and physical environment so as to be able to act from internally compelling love in ways which are personally pleasing, intuitively worthwhile and provide a basis for faith.

So leisure relative to self-determined and activity-experience with the free time to get the feeling inside during the personal choice, as this reason that leisure has different define to different people but it is an important part of our life.

Week 2

This week's lecture focused on the history of leisure, those points really shows different world to me:

Hunter- gatherer societies: before class structure and specific work, there was no definition between work and leisure.

Greek: leisure was for those people who had time to spare, they might not time to do nothing but have time to think and ponder the issues about life.

Roman - leisure became a necessary time for preparation of the next work days, and there was not limited to higher classes. The leisure was used as political tool and the governments hold circuses to remain in favors with the community.

Middle ages - leisure became less evident, particularly for those lower in society.

Industrial Revolution - there was a clear distinction of work hours was developed, as this reason, the time of leisure raised.

Modern - the society changed by the technology, such as a lot of Australian families lived further from city or the place they work, because the car can reduce the time on the way, also woman had more time for leisure as the technology reduce the time of housework, the time of leisure increased.

However leisure time for now becomes a "purchase time", people spend time to work and earn money to buy things to let life more comfortable. Just few years ago, when my parents have holiday for New Year, that time was most happy time in whole year. Because people all get time to stay with their family or friends, we cooked dinner and watched TV, have a chat whit each other together. However, now time, just have dinner at restaurant together and maybe watch TV then sleep very early. The New Year became "boring" to most people although we have a rich life. Just like Diza (1999) said that we are rich on materially while we are poor in happiness. Alike situation, most spent a lot of time and money on traveling, however all they got are keep walking with guide and take photos and buy lot of things. They feel tired and unhappy at lost but when they talk about that they still feel existing although they still cannot get points weather it real. Kelly (1996) states that, the workers are reward gave the power of purchasing leisure and consequently the purchase of pleasure. It seems that we may lose the way to leisure.

We may consider which way can be define as leisure, unless keep purchasing cannot get relax because leisure is a time for people have rest and happiness then back to work. Leisure is not rarer than 50 years ago; we get more free time however we just lose the real meaning of leisure.

Week 3

This week lecture is about the benefit of leisure and the question is the one of benefits of leisure that I consider is most important and the reason.

There are 5 broad areas benefits:

- Physical benefits: about increased fitness and strength

- Psychological benefits: about improved self esteem and reduced stress

- Spiritual benefits: about realizing your position in the world and appreciating nature

- Social benefits: about improved relationship

- Economic benefits: about stimulating local industry or saving money

From my personal view, those benefits all contribute to the quality of life, help people improve their whole life. Psychological benefits might be much more important than other to me. Basically, most of leisure activities are about the psychological. Not similar like other benefits, psychological paid more attention on the improve individual's ability. Contribute to early lectures; it is easy to found leisure is for people rest than back to their