A Day off

When I was in Scotland, a cousin told me that the old aunts had always observed a weekly day of rest. A time when they did not do housework, when they, at the most, went to services, or had time with family. My cousin said that sometimes she hesitated even now to put in a laundry on that one day of the week.

A pause like this has many names in many traditions. The Sabbath, Shabbat, only one letter difference there, an in common acknowledgment that even the Creator took a day off when the work was done, not just to rest, but to appreciate what had been accomplished. To enjoy the world that had been made.

My children were teenagers when the province of Nova Scotia had a vote to see if stores could be open on Sundays. We voted yes, to join the modern world, but I am beginning to wonder if, on a personal level, we need to bring the concept of one day different back.

Particularly now.

These are not the best of times. There is war in the Middle East. I was in a fabric store years ago when they bombed Bagdad. There was a music station playing in the background from speakers overhead. A song was interrupted by a news flash. I remember an older woman at the cutting table lifting up her bolt of fabric and slamming it down. “Here they go again. The women and children are going to do the suffering.” It was a statement that could be said about every war, before, since and now.

She was right. Trouble is not new, but what is new is that we are so involved with it, every minute of every day. Can you imagine spending nights in the tube in London during the Blitz on a phone, in real time, watching the bombers advance? Then news came by radio or in newspapers printed once or at the most twice a day. This interval in information gave people time to process what had happened and to prepare best they could for what was to come.

Without that break, we overload instead. Become paralyzed by incessant input, stunned, and then powerless. So overwhelmed that the resources are not in us to say “hang on there” to the autocrats who say common sense is an illusion. In a public level I wonder if we are being numbed into indifference, at the private level, I wonder why the most comfortable lives in a millennium are also the ones that talk most about burnout. No one waits anymore. Sits. Any unscheduled time and out the screens come. Heads down in waiting rooms, beside plates while we eat, we are crushing ourselves in the weight of information and of to-do lists of activity and self- improvement beyond our time and attention. We are letting ourselves be crushed by facts and invented obligations.

We do anything but rest.

This makes me thing we need to revisit the Sabbath. One of my sons and his partner tried a digital day off and that got me thinking. Of what that day used to be and what would look like in my life right now.

I’ve been trying it out. It is not easy. But maybe that’s the lesson. I think back to what they used to do in many traditions and it seems to me this was meant to be a day off from whatever happened the rest of the week. A day when it allowed, even required, not to produce. A day to turn the sign in the window to “Closed.” To shut off the phone, the news. A day to not get ready, to get ahead, or to get caught up.

A day of time off and time out. A day to visit, to go for walks, to fool around with the dog, talk to the cat, to read books and drink tea, enjoy the way plants grow, be satisfied by what you have made of your life, and recognized that this one day a week is what you have earned.

Live in the moment they call it. To enjoy each other and ourselves where we are right now.

I had an afternoon like that with my sweet mother-in-law this week. I had a hundred things to do but instead I went to visit her. We sat and talked and the room was filled with relatives, all of them still living and with us. We laughed at the husband who must be out somewhere on one of his projects and would be along soon. We talked about the way the wind was blowing the trees that day, of how her father was one of fourteen, and that she had baked five loaves of bread every week for close to eighty years. We talked about knitting mitts and younger brothers who had never got old but still lived in the old house. We had nothing but time to share, and when I left Rose hugged me and said, “what a lovely afternoon this has been.”

Which is all any of us really need.

On the way home, I reached for my phone but left it in my purse.

I knew that was for some other time.