Entertainment and Diversion

What's your relationship to entertainment?

First, let's get clear about what we're discussing. Here's how the online dictionary I often use defines it, at least the aspect I'm writing about today

1. the act of entertaining; agreeable occupation for the mind; diversion; amusement.

2. something affording pleasure, diversion, or amusement, especially a performance of some kind.

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4. a divertingly adventurous, comic, or picaresque novel.

What struck me about these definitions was that only one word is common to all of them: diversion (the key definitions of which relate to a "turning aside").

Don't worry, this will not turn into an assault on entertainment. However, because it is often true that the content of what we are doing is less important than the state of Mind in relationship to it, it is worth bringing some awareness to how Mind relates to entertainment.

How much of your attention does entertainment take? Do you divert yourself occasionally, or do you come home from work and submit yourself to entertainment until bedtime? How important is your entertainment to you?

Personally, I think entertainment is a lovely way to get inside the human experience of another, perhaps even finding something of ourselves in the interior life of the author, the musician, the dancer. There's value in that, I believe.

But what about an immersion in my own interior life?

As one friend of mine suggested , it may be that we use entertainment as a substitute for play. This resonates for me -- when I am fully absorbed in something in the way a child is absorbed in play, I don't have much of a need to be entertained. As Shalom Mountain-founder Jerry Jud said in that same conversation, "when I'm fully present in being, the last thing I want is to be entertained."

So, the practice invitation is to eavesdrop on your inner conversation about entertainment. Get curious about how you hold entertainment, how much time you spend on it, and from what it might be diverting you.