Work and Leisure

Serious leisure, volunteerism, quality of life 209advance for the parent at home that afternoon or evening. When both parentshave to be away from home the same evening with one doing volunteer work,their children, if young, become the focus of a special obligative tension. Thatis, a babysitter must be engaged (more advanced planning), a necessity mademore complicated in linguistically endogamous households where this personmust meet not only the usual moral standards for this responsibility but alsothe language requirement of speaking passable French. Such people can bedifficult to find in Canada’s urban francophone communities, and whenfound, may live at some distance from the volunteer’s home.Finally, some respondents experienced a leisure tension, which unlike thepreceding tensions, is mainly positive. That is, committed to certain volunteerroles (leisure), they then discovered how little time they had for other leisureactivities they were also fond of. The volunteers in this study nearly alwaysresolved this tension by favouring volunteering, though often not withoutdisquieting recognition that they were missing something interesting and satisfying.On this note, a handful of respondents said they had no leisure, or atleast no other leisure. Schedule conflicts among volunteer commitments constitutedfor several interviewees an especially annoying variant of the leisuretension. Missing, for example, a meeting of the board of directors of thetheatre society, of which one is secretary, to attend a meeting of the parishcouncil, of which one is chair, would be most bothersome for these interviewees,in part, because they believe effective coordination of communityvolunteer activities is possible.When I asked the respondents in this study to discuss their dislikes apropostheir pursuits, I indicated my interest lay in more serious matters than petpeeves. Dislikes are problems requiring the volunteer to adjust significantly,possibly even to leave the volunteer role. It turned out that in these twofrancophone communities, as most everywhere else in life, annoyances wereprevalent, whereas deeper dislikes were much rarer. On the one hand, all butthree respondents could describe at least one substantially disagreeable aspectof key volunteering. On the other hand, very few could describe more thantwo.The two most prominent dislikes were behaviour of difficult persons andshortage of reliable volunteers. The first are infamous for their propensity tocomplain excessively about all sorts of issues and be exceptionally criticalof others. Fortunately, difficult persons are uncommon in these twocommunities, though this makes their presence even more conspicuous. Theproblem of a shortage of reliable volunteers baffled leaders of both communities,since many francophones live there who could do volunteer work.The remaining dislikes, each mentioned less often than these two, are forthe most part related to one of the tensions just described. Thus somerespondents disliked the temporal tension, particularly their occasional lackof control over events, volunteer and otherwise, that engender it. Althoughlack of control is only sporadic, it is still aggravating when it occurs, as when