Who said, “Better to live simply, be poor and have the time to wander?”

St. Francis? Buddha?

Nope, it was the 20th-century poet Gary Snyder summing up the sentiment behind the beatniks of the 1950s. The beatniks, he observed, preferred to wander rather than pursue the American standard of living.

The beatniks understood a simple truth. To have carefree time and genuine freedom, a person has three options: Get a lot money, reduce desires to a minimum, do a little of both.

If I were single, I’d opt for the third approach. But whenever I think about using my (very) small bucket of wealth to semi-retire, to work 20 hours a week and use the rest of my time to wander and enjoy every sunny day, I look at my children and trudge back to the office. That kind of detached life simply doesn’t fit me.

Do I wish I could be like Jack Kerouac or, much better, St. Francis? Sure, but I can’t be like Jack or Francis unless I want to be like the Enlightenment philosopher Rousseau, who put his five children in an orphanage to preserve his intellectual leisure.

My situation isn’t unusual. It’s a plight that acutely hits a person in middle age, a time of life when existence stops making sense to a lot of people. They then do stupid things, especially the men. I fear stupidity, so, having recently turned 40, I took a preemptive step. I rearranged my law practice and shifted to a four-day work week.

Every Friday, I’m off. I say the Morning Office, go to Mass, walk and wander, read, write, nap, shoot pool, drink beer, play with my kids. I don’t do all that every Friday. I occasionally have to work Friday in order to meet clients’ needs. But, for the most part, the plan has worked.

The first four days of the week are pretty grueling, but I don’t mind. In fact, I’m more focused during those four days. My efficiency has skyrocketed. I don’t worry about the exhausting nature of those four days because I know I will soon have three free days. Sure, my wife and children make a lot of demands on my time during those days, but those demands are full of joy, not drudgery. And no matter what, every three-day weekend provides a fair amount of leisure.

That’s important. The great Catholic philosopher Josef Pieper once said leisure is an “inner absence of preoccupation, a calm, an ability to let things go,” and that it is “the necessary preparation for accepting reality.” Put another way, leisure is the necessary preparation for receiving God’s creation.

The goodness of creation is received in calm, not frenzy. It’s no wonder God rested after he created. He was then able to enjoy his efforts. He rested on the seventh day, made it holy — see Genesis 2:3 — and told us to do likewise.

I’ve taken that single-day injunction and made it three. Excessive? Maybe, but as a culture, we work too much and too hard. The excess work feeds our love for money and distorts our vision of reality, of the goodness God created.

We need to be more like St. Francis. I’m not saying I’ve attained his spiritual heights (not nearly), but when the four-day week is over and I’ve done the best I can to shut off the world of money-making, I do feel a bit like Kerouac — who wrote, in Visions of Cody, “Everything belongs to me because I am poor.”

It’s a good feeling, and probably the nearest I get to sanctity.

Eric Scheske writes from

Sturgis, Michigan.