It’s Time to Stop and Be Still
Our drive toward endless productivity is ending
It’s midday and I’m in bed. I just returned here, freshly showered, after my walk and a leisurely breakfast (which I ate in bed). I’ve had my tea while curled up in the blankets. Then I had a cookie. Then I read for a while.
Underneath this tranquility is deep discomfort. I’m at war with myself. I feel like I should be up, doing something productive. The floors need to be vacuumed. The clutter on my desk could be cleared away. I have work projects that should be finished by now.
But also…I don’t rest much. I don’t take many breaks. I don’t read much. I have to talk myself into meditation.
Letting go of the need to be productive is hard. I’m trying, though. On this third Saturday of self-quarantine, I decided to get out of bed only when I wanted to — nine, as it turned out. Yes, that felt scandalously late. Yes, I woke up around 7:30 and laid about feeling not so much rested and relaxed but tied up with anxiety about how lazy I was being.
Letting go of the need to be productive is hard.
I made breakfast, then journaled, then read, then texted a few friends, then gave myself an orgasm, then finally dragged myself out of bed to take a walk — the one thing I insisted on doing today in order to support my mental and physical health.
Other than that, I’m challenging myself to do as little as possible today and stay as close to my bed as I can.
Why, you ask? Why push myself into laziness?
Because I fear there’s a disease that’s even more insidious, virulent, and dangerous than COVID-19 — the disease of busyness.
My memories are a strange tapestry of sequences that flash through my head like a movie on fast-forward:
- I remember taking extra credits during my senior year of high school in order to graduate on time after a move to a new state expunged my junior year credits, staying up until 3 or 4 in the morning in an attempt to finish all my coursework.
- I remember the year my sister got married just a few months before I graduated from college and I’d spend so much time helping her plan her wedding that I’d be up all night trying to finish my schoolwork.
- I remember staying 3 or 4 hours after my shifts ended to prep student work for the next day (unpaid time, since I was an hourly employee).
- I remember working nights and weekends at my last job, sometimes getting so tired and hungry that I’d become lightheaded and need to sit down.
When I was home, that wasn’t “rest time.” I had side hustles that I was determined to make work — my bath and body business, my writing, my paintings… That was the work that I so desperately wanted to do in the world, and in some ways, putting all my extra time into it helped keep me going. But it was exhausting to push so hard.
Then there were the chores to keep up with. The random house projects that needed to be finished. Favors for family members or friends to complete. I got to the point where I considered fifteen minutes of knitting to be decadent, and taking a bath with a handful of Epsom salts carelessly thrown into the tub was a major indulgence.
When I was home, that wasn’t “rest time.”
I miss the understanding of rest and work cycles that I had as a child. I remember how hard I would run and jump and play, and then I’d spend hours reading on a pile of beach towels underneath the trees. I’d set up blankets and pillows on the floor in my room so I could have a comfortable place to rest when I needed a break from bicycling or swimming. And I’d often just lie on my back on the grass and watch the tree branches swaying above me.
Of course, it’s socially acceptable to do this as a child. It wasn’t until middle school that I was taught to be productive above all else. Start with the fact that we were in school from the ungodly hour of 7:30AM until 2:30PM with only a half hour break in the middle for lunch. No more recess. No more fun. I hated that as a 12-year-old, and I hated it as a teacher, too. I don’t believe a schedule like that is conducive to learning.
Then came high school, where I was given at least two and a half hours of homework each night, after an hour of commuting by bus and seven hours of school. It was grueling. And again, as a former educator, I passionately disagree with many current educational practices that teach students how to keep the hamster wheel rolling instead of teaching them how to be critical thinkers and fulfilled members of society.
Once we leave high school, we’re well-trained for what awaits us, for the nonstop, go-go-go, work-until-you-bleed culture that prizes filling our schedules over everything else.
What would happen if the world stopped and we could no longer pursue productivity in the ways we defined as “useful?”
Oh, wait! That’s happened! We are here witnessing a world that has come to a full pause. Businesses shutting down. Schools closed. People forced to stay at home.
It’s surreal, to be sure. But we are here now and I can’t help but wonder — what if we allowed this to fully turn us upside-down?
How many times have I gone to work sick? I’ve only ever had jobs with one week of paid sick leave and one or two weeks of paid vacation, and while I’m not complaining about paid days off, I think it’s fair to say that expecting the average human to only need five days a year to recover from illness, a family member’s illness, insomnia, or other health issue is pretty unrealistic.
How many times have I swallowed a handful of Aleve when I had to lead events for over a hundred coworkers or supervise a class field trip on the first day of my period, during which I’d experience pain that literally once landed me in the back of an ambulance? You can’t stay home one a day a month, even if you have severe, undiagnosed medical problems associated with your menstrual cycle.
Even my downtime is unforgiving. I literally have boxes of untouched yarn all over my house for all the sweaters, shawls, and hats I want to make. I have bags of roving just in case I decide to get back to spinning. There are dozens of books on the table next to my bed that go unread while I binge Netflix shows. Cookbooks littered everywhere with dog-eared pages for all the recipes I want to try. But no worries — it’s all on the to-do list!
Sometimes, it takes a major life transition to jar us into a new reality. When I quit my job in the fall of 2018 due to the fact that I couldn’t sleep anymore because my stress was so out of control, I didn’t have a plan except that I would live off my savings for a full month before I started looking for work so I could let myself just be.
Except it didn’t work out that way.
Every single day, I chastised myself for sleeping until 7:30 (when normally, I’d have put in at least half an hour of work at the office by then). I felt like a criminal when my retired neighbors ran into me while I was raking the front yard at 11AM on a Tuesday. I ducked when cars drove by, in case people saw me through my windows, home on a weekday.
I felt like I had cheated, somehow, and that I was going to have to pay the piper, eventually.
Once I started freelancing and controlling my own schedule, it took me almost eight months to stop feeling guilty for waking up at any time past 5AM. To stop feeling like an asshole if I slept for seven or eight hours instead of the four I was used to. To stop berating myself for taking half a day off when I got my period so I could rest and not make myself sick by taking too many painkillers. To stop feeling like I was breaking the rules when I got sick and would stay in bed for two or three days.
Eventually, I came to see that getting sleep, resting when I needed to, and tending to pain or illness was a normal, reasonable thing to do. That this encouragement to ignore the body and just keep pushing it to produce is just one of the diseases of our culture.
I felt like I had cheated, somehow, and that I was going to have to pay the piper, eventually.
I think we are coming to understand that keeping busy, over-working ourselves, and filling every square on our calendars is not helping us. It didn’t stop this disease. It didn’t stop our economy from taking a deadly blow. And for most of us, continuing to produce-produce-produce is not going to help this pass any faster.*
Maybe we can use this time, though, to build a new sensibility. A world in which we value our need for sleep. A world in which we don’t expect people to come to work when they’ve been up all night with a sick baby, or when they, themselves, are sick. A world in which women can have a little time to tend to their needs during their menstrual cycles. A world in which everyone — no matter their gender — gets paid family leave to take care of a newborn or an ailing family member. A world in which we don’t feel compelled to treat our hobbies like to-do lists.
And, just to dream really big: a world in which BEING is far, far more important than DOING.
*There are a lot of people out there right now who are doing-doing-doing — keeping grocery store shelves filled, taking care of those who have fallen ill, dealing with the public, working on a vaccine, etc. I am very grateful to all of these people and mean no disrespect to them in the writing of this article. ❤
© Yael Wolfe 2020
