I have a sink full of dishes at the moment, and at 7:20 p.m. on a Friday night I’m going to continue to have that sink full of dishes until tomorrow morning some time. Tonight my plan is to program my new smart phone–the first new phone in three years (a lifetime for technology)–and sit around, watch television shows I recorded earlier in the week, and totally veg. It has been a long, mentally and emotionally taxing week. In short, it has been a normal week. I am grateful for the weekend. Even though I have a variety of work to do this weekend, it is mostly drama free: things like my sink full of dishes, changing the sheets on my bed, and cleaning and sweeping my room. I also will work on my income taxes, which while not exactly fun or drama free will still require a different kind of energy than I expend at my workplace. I am grateful to be working and even more grateful for the weekend break.
I have learned a lot in what has felt like two weeks worth of week. Yesterday I wrote about the passage of time and about learning to live in the moment. Several times throughout the course of this day, beginning the moment I woke up this morning, I found myself rushing around like the white rabbit in Alice in Wonderland, “I’m late, I’m late for a very important date.” The only thing was that I wasn’t late for anything. Even though I slept through the alarm a number of times–giving myself permission to wake “late” at 6 a.m. rather than 5:39–I nonetheless ended up getting to work early. I began thinking about how I am in the habit of rushing and feeling rushed; there’s the sense of there simply not being enough time in the day to get everything done that I hope to accomplish. But what if it weren’t that I don’t have enough time to do everything I want and need to get done; what if it really is that I have too many things on an out-of-control list of things I feel pressed to get done. Hmmmm.
When we look at the totality of things we attempt to stuff into a day, it’s no wonder we are worn out at the end of a week. Many of us believe that the work we’re doing is important, worth sacrificing for on behalf of the people we serve or the products we create or the problems we solve…and it probably is important. And yet we have to balance that important work with the practical realities, the laws of nature and physics that say we can only get so much done in the course of a day or week.
There’s a proverb that says, “All their days their work is grief and pain; even at night their minds do not rest. This too is meaningless,” and another that says, “It is useless to get up early and to stay up late, eating the food of exhausting labor— truly God gives sleep to those he loves.” In short, what does all the rushing and running from one meeting to the next, sending emails late at night, writing proposals and plans and tip sheets accomplish? And how can we begin to let go of some of the overdoing and focus our attention on those things that we realistically can get done without wearing ourselves down or burning ourselves out in the process?
I am grateful to be thinking and learning more about how to bring a more mindful approach to how I engage my work. It is possible to do work with dedication and passion in such a way that we remain whole in the process. I’m going to keep working on how to do this for myself and then how to model it for the people I work with. In the meantime, I am practicing slowing down, not rushing when I am not late, being present to what is going on around me rather than hurrying past it. I still have some work to do in this area, but I’m continuing to think about it, practice it, and learn as I go. I’ve no doubt it’ll be well worth the effort.
