The WiFi is cutting out and I slept late. So I was wondering if it was I who had sinned, or my parents, and then I remembered that it was my children who didn’t finish their school work until 10pm last night. I mean, maybe you’re the kind of homeschooler who just goes to bed when something major is due, but I, being…what’s the word…an anxious basket case, prefer to stay up so I can scream hysterically if necessary. So when my alarm sounded loud and clear at 4:30 am as usual, I turned it off and asked God to take me home, which he didn’t, so here I am.
Every morning as I wander around the news and the Bible—I mean, of course it should be the other way around, but lets not lie and say we are “disciplined” when really we are barely awake and there’s a dog pushing us off the bed, and it’s hard to see which app you meant to choose first when you don’t even have your glasses on—I stop for a moment on Flipboard’s Work-Life Balance offering. I only ever get there after looking at lots of Saudi’s taking selfies, the world raging at some celebrity white person whose name I can’t remember trying to do her hair in an Afro, the purse that is totally in this season, and the hair of Mr. Trump, but I do usually find my way. And this morning the lead piece? Article? Advertising encrusted blog post? I don’t know what to call it—was all about how laziness is a virtue to cultivate. The person, who apparently is a productivity expert, likes to lie around on the off days, doing nothing, because that’s a good way to unwind. This incredible information was delivered in the usual breathless I-bet-you-never-thought-of-this sort of way. I’m not going to link it because that would mean going back and trying to even remember where Flipboard is after finally updating all my devices. (Technology is hard. Let’s go shopping.)
To restate the obvious, the frenetic pace of an internet driven life is mentally and spiritually tiring. Add thereto the perverse reality that every year, this one included, I manage to fill up every corner of my life with actual work. I decide to do a good job at the work I’m supposed to be doing and school five days a week, because that makes sense. It’s what other people do. Which leaves all the promised work of church for the weekend. When I’m super “productive” it feels like I’m doing a sixty hour school week, a 25 hour church week, a 10 hour house cleaning week, and then I’m taking my writing life and cramming it down the gullet of—I guess that image is not going to work out since weeks aren’t people and they don’t have throats or teeth that can bite back or anything.
So when Jesus said to the Pharisees, after healing one of those guys on the sabbath, “my Father is working until now and I Am Working,” I heard him loud and clear. “So am I,” I muttered plaintively. I also am working until now. Not by holding up the cosmos, of course, nor by redeeming the world or anything, but by completely misjudging the frailty of my own body and thinking that every day can be filled up to its full measure.
The new remedy, I’ve decided, is not to do anything more than download an app called Toggl. I don’t even know what it does. It looks like its for people who work for companies doing projects of various kinds, but maybe I can see how much time I am really spending on everything and if there is some way to balance the work with the life, as if they were not the same thing, when, truly, we all know that they are exactly the same and there is no difference and never will be, at least on this side of the grave. Let my working life, as it were, be a warning to others. Or tell me if there’s a better app that will let me waste some of the time I don’t even have.
Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In