Painting as a Pastime

By Winston S. Churchill
Foreword by Os Guinness
(2001)

Taking time away alone from the daily stresses is increasingly important for refreshment and clear thinking to direct one’s life.

Time pressure and drivenness are defining marks of our modern world—“25-hour days,” breakneck “24-7-365” schedules, omnipresent BlackBerrys, and packed Palm Pilots dictate how people live today. But in such a high-tech era, it is a low-tech traditional discipline that offers the greatest relief and perspective: Solitude.

As Winston Churchill observes in his essay, “Painting as a Pastime,” our Fall 2001 Reading, change is vital to relief of pressure. For Churchill, time spent alone painting provided a meaningful and necessary course of mental refreshment, a hobby he acquired during a trying period of political failure. He also discusses other beneficial and solitary diversions in his essay. Senior Fellow Os Guinness unwraps Churchill’s message for the twenty-first century audience, which often avoids solitude and mistakes drivenness with true purpose.

“Change is the master key. A man can wear out a particular part of his mind by continually using it and tiring it, just in the same way as he can wear out the elbows of his coat.”
Winston Churchill, “Painting as a Pastime”

Category: Readings (No. 29)