Leisure is Freedom

Gunther Balz retired at age 53.

Now 66, he looks relaxed in khaki shorts and a pink shirt, and he is with his beautiful wife, Susan, in their oceanfront condominium in Highland Beach, Florida, and he is saying he does whatever he wants whenever he wants, and that he is truly a free and happy man.

“I believe people are more fulfilled if they have purposeful leisure time,” he says. “Our society does not emphasize the idea of leisure enough. We always think, well, if we have more time, we can do more work and make more money. I don’t think that’s a very sensible outlook.”

In his retirement, Balz earned a Ph.D in psychology from Florida Atlantic University. It was, he says, simply for the sheer love of learning. “People always ask me, ‘Well, what are you going to do with your degree,’ and I say, ‘Well, probably nothing.’ And they look at me, like, Are you crazy?”

Balz holds 48 patents. A few turned out to be real big moneymakers. The main one is a machine used all over the world. In 1953, he earned an MIT degree in management, the same year he became president of his father’s company in Kalamazoo, Mi., a firm that dealt with machinery for the auto industry. Later he became chairman until he sold the company in 1979.

“When push comes to shove, I know how to work too,” he says. “But I don’t consider it something that one has to do 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, 10 years in a row.”

Socrates said

Balz now is reading a series of Victorian novels. He loves classical music, especially the organ works of Bach. He owns an airplane and is a licensed aircraft mechanic. Once he won the National Air Races events at Reno, Nevada.

Every morning, he studies. He has taught himself French and German and now is studying Latin and Quantum Mechanics. Mid-morning, he plays tennis. After lunch, he goes to the hangar to work on his airplane, where he now also is building a new plane. He once wrote and published a book of poetry. “I hope before I die to also master ancient Greek,” he says.

“I’ve had men ask me, ‘Why are you wasting your life? Why aren’t you working? Why don’t you start another business?’”

They don’t understand, he says. If you look at fifth century Athens and the idea of balance, you’ll see that Plato and Socrates both said that that which is unbalanced is unhealthy.

“See, balance,” Balz says, “means the spiritual, the physical, the mental and the emotional. All these things must be in balance, otherwise you live an unfulfilled life.

“We’ve gotten so far away from these simple ancient ideas because no one reads that stuff anymore. We’re all so busy trying to get one up on the competition.”

Balz knows all about the unbalanced life, he says. He lived one.

Workaholic culture

“I grew up in a time and a place where most well-to-do people were alcoholics. It just was the way life was. Leisure to those people meant getting plastered. They drank every day. I was raised in that culture.

“The culture at MIT was extremely polar. The Navy was the same way. And so was the working atmosphere in Michigan. You worked like hell, then partied like hell. Many of the business people I dealt with drank a lot. It was considered manly.”

Balz was just like them, he says, until his 40s when he began to change. He had started a French wine collection and had stopped drinking hard liquor. “I just lost interest and decided it wasn’t good to drink so much,” he says. Then 10 years ago, he sold the wine collection too.

Now he drinks no alcohol, and he and his wife are vegetarians. “Leisure to me is a healthy pastime; it means you have to stay healthy. It’s a combination of eating correctly, sleeping correctly, and exercising,” he says, adding that a competitive, workaholic culture just doesn’t take into account our need for health or for rest and relaxation.

“Enjoying your life,” Balz says, “is an attitude. It has nothing to do with anything else. It doesn’t matter if you’re wealthy or poor. It has to do with how you feel about things. You choose to be happy.”

Many people, he says, seem not to understand him. Maybe, he says, it’s because they wouldn’t know what to do with so much free time. But the unhurried life, he says, is of great value.

“It makes some people very uncomfortable to say, ‘I don’t know what’s going to happen next. So what?’ But the most valuable lesson I have learned in life is to live comfortably with uncertainty.”

It is uncertainty, he says, that is the pathway to freedom.

“Freedom has always been a big thing for me. Many people are content to be under somebody’s thumb. They don’t want to have to think too much themselves. I’ve always felt the opposite. To be free and to do what I want, when I want, has always been my highest value.”

by Liz Karagianis

On Topic: alumni/ae, business, entrepreneurship