The Importance of Recreation

I recently spoke to a group of young business professional during a seminar I gave in Cincinnati, Ohio and one of the topics I covered was the need to make time for recreation.

In today's highly competitive business world we live in, where the need and pressure to succeed is greater than ever most people fail to make the time for recreation; a time for rest, relaxation and most importantly renewal.

Most people look at recreation as a chance to have fun and maybe play their favorite sport, but to me recreation is more important than that. To me recreation is all about taking the time away from work to reevaluate your life, your life, work, goals, and reason for living.

Taking a morning or an afternoon off to play a round of golf or a game of tennis, simply doesn't give you enough time reevaluate your life. You need more time than that, several days or even a week or two.

For me it's taking the time to go to a beach and just walking along the beach or just sitting and watching the waves come in. It's the therapy of the fresh are, the sea itself

Everyone has his or her own way, or should have his or her own way or recreation or renewal, so that he or she can look at life once again with a new interest and enthusiasm. What's yours?

My friends and associates have different ways as well; for some it's gardening; for others it's painting, cooking, fishing, and camping. I have one associate that get recreational therapy from mountain climbing. Everyone needs to get away for some recreation.

For any recreation to be meaningful and fulfilling it must do three things: (1) It must stimulate your identity, the person you really are: (2) It must be stimulating: (3) It must give you a level of security as to take away your anxieties from work.

Occasional recreation helps you find yourself, reestablish who you are, and what you want, it helps with your identity. It most certainly involves change and stimulation, and it helps you develop inner security, the kind you need the most. If you have inner security, real security as a person, your world can come crashing down all around you and you can still emerge secure within yourself and build a new and possibly better one.

So when you find yourself getting stale, what you need is some meaningful recreation; you need to stop the world and get off for a while and look at things from a distance. You'll be surprised at the new ideas you'll get; and the new opportunities you'll see, opportunities that have been there all along but you've been too close to see them.

When you're lost in the recreation that you love, you're really living; you're living as fully as it's possible to live. That's the whole idea of life, isn't it?