The opposite of work is play, also an active verb. It could be tennis or birdwatching, so long as it's meditative and makes you feel better afterward.Growing sunflowers and beans is like that, for some of us. Cooking is like that. So is canning tomatoes, and making mozzarella. Doing that with my kids feels like family life in every happy sense. When people see the size of our garden or the stocks in our pantry and shake their heads, saying "What a lot of work," I know what they're really saying. This is the polite construction in our language for "What a dope." They can think so. But they're wrong. —Barbara Kingsolver, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle