Continuous Rest at Work

Hi, everyone. So I've been, I've been pretty

isolated during the pandemic deliberately. And by choice and

privilege I have not so far been spending a lot of time out in

places doing things, because out in places means out proximate to

people, and people suddenly got really dangerous. But today, in

the course of running some errands, I walked by the local

branch of my library. And I decided that maybe I should pay

them a quick visit. I grew up in libraries. I literally grew up

in libraries every Saturday, many weekday nights. It was

something I think that my mother could do with me that was not

perplexing. And so we did it a lot. And my family has always

valued learning and education. And so with their value of

learning, and education, and my love of books, a lifelong love

was born. And so when I'm feeling unsettled, when things

don't feel right, when everything seems to be upside

down and backwards, going to a library is soothing, for me. I

know this isn't true for everyone, I have a close friend,

who experienced libraries as places where she was told to

shush and do things like study and not allowed to be curious or

interested or active or excited. And I know that libraries aren't

really all like that anymore. But that was fairly true when we

were growing up and, and I understand why she feels that

way. But my libraries, my library experience was an

experience of refuge, an experience of imagination, an

experience of possibility, an experience of a way to access

things that were beyond my reach. So I went to the library.

And this branch library is a beautiful little Arts and Crafts

building, on the corner of a major street and a minor street.

In my neighborhood, walking distance, exactly the way one

thinks a small town library should be except this isn't a

small town. It has friendly librarians, several self

checkout stations, tables and lights and places to plug in,

and ranks and ranks books. And one of the books that I stumbled

across in my futile attempt to get something lighthearted is

called "The Sabbath World" by Judith Shulevitz. I promise this

is related to business. So I picked up this book and I

started paging through it because I've been increasingly

engaged with the idea that sabbath that this idea of, of

deliberate, structured, rest is critical to good business. And

that our loss of that over the course of mostly the industrial

revolution, but also other things, has led us to a place as

humanity where we are much less able to do good work in the

right kind of time; we've lost the sense of rightness to

timing, and instead, rightness belongs to the clock. She

explores these ideas in some detail even right in the

beginning of the book, but but I had already been thinking about

them extensively, significantly. And I've also been thinking

about how alarms set containers and containers make things

possible. Right? Boundaries, make things possibl;e we can do

this because we're not doing that; we can start this because

we stopped that. We can make spaces where we need to make

spaces. I set alarms, not anymore to make sure that I'm

awake, although there's a little bit of that still in there for

me, but mostly to remind me that it's time to start turning

toward my day. I can get caught up in all kinds of cogitation

and ideation and never really turn toward the mechanics of my

day or the things on my calendar, if I don't set an

alarm that says "Okay, let's start turning toward the day."

So that's what my morning alarms usually mean. Let's turn toward

the day.

It sets a boundary between the liminality of the waking up

space, of the preparing space, of the showering and praying

space and the concreteness of my day. But even there, my days are

at least 50% thinking; thinking, and dreaming and imagining and

feeling my way into what's coming next. And that's not

because I don't run a business, I do run a business. But because

the kind of business I run relies on my brain having that

space, to do the work that my business calls for. So even,

even in the quotidian existence, there's this demand of my system

and of the system for this spaciousness for this space and

time. And I believe that this is not unique to clergy, who are

often accorded this, even by contract, or to, to academics,

who are often at least accorded a sabbatical time and are not

considered to be quote unquote, "not working" if they're sitting

in their office staring into space with a paper in front of

them, but also, everybody else. Everybody needs to be accorded

this time. Everybody needs to be accorded the space. And when

people are accorded this time and space, things come out of

solution, they percolate out. My father is a chemical engineer.

And when I was maybe in elementary school, maybe middle

school, I learned about flocculants, I learned what the

word flocculant means. A flocculant is usually a chemical

that you add to a solution to cause something to come out of

solution, usually as a solid, and, and so it causes this stuff

to like, coalesce and fall down, I think of it as like snowing

inside a vial of liquid or a vat of liquid. And, and we need, we

need- This space and time is actually the thing that makes

that happen for us, that makes our brains create the space for

us to have more original thoughts, to have deeper

thoughts, to have more complex thoughts, those things happen

when we're not being stimulated externally. When we're not

surrounding ourselves with words and ideas and videos. I do all

of that. I put all the stuff into my head. And you know, this

book is another way of putting things in, although I can much

more easily stop and stare into space when she says something

that I want to think about for a while. But when I think about

running an ethical business, when I think about how do we

construct a working world that is, in fact, continuously

sustainable? Of course, we need time off, we need days off, we

probably need half the week off. Honestly, 40 hours a week was

supposed to be the starting point. And then unions lost the

power to negotiate for what actually makes sense for human

beings. But they're coming back, I hope they're coming back. And

also, we shouldn't, as owners of businesses, we should not

require unions to force us into that. We should not require this

kind of negotiation to force us into that. We should be able to

come up with this on our own. You know, every time unions try

to organize in like Starbucks or something, they try to convince

the people who are trying to organize that, oh, we're

friends, you don't need to organize with us, we're going to

take care of you, but they're not taking care of them. That's

why the organizing is happening. So I think unions should exist.

I think that's fine. I think collective bargaining makes a

lot of sense. And I think that as owners of businesses, as

people in charge of departments as people in management roles,

we need to be proactively meeting the needs of our people

so that they don't have to negotiate as hard to get their

needs met. It works better for everyone it makes for a better

business, a better work environment, more productive

employees in the end, but even if it didn't, even if people

were less productive as a result of having their needs met, it

would still be the right thing to do. And that's why we should

do it.

So as business owners, my question for us, and it's an

ongoing question, but my question for us is how, how are

we creating spaciousness in the rhythm and cadence of our

businesses? And in the rhythm and cadence of our business

transactions? So if I ask someone for something, most of

the time, how do I make sure that I'm not forcing them into

an undue rush? How do I make sure that I'm not forcing them

into overstretching their capacity? I want them to give me

the thing. I may have a schedule I'd like to have it on. But one

of the things I can do to make that a more humane transaction,

more a transaction between humans and less a transaction

between business entities, even if it is a transaction between

business entities; how can how can we, as business owners, be

that change, effect that change, right now in our in our

interactions. What can we do? How can we communicate better?

How can we plan better? How can we anticipate better? How can we

create more buffers, more spaciousness in our own

schedule? So if somebody does need something in a hurry, it

doesn't actually stress us out. It's like, oh, yeah, I always

keep extra buffer space in my schedule for that. How do we

make those spaces in our stuff? So that the lives of ourselves

and the people we interact with and our workers are all

transformed, are all more spacious, all have a continuous

rest. Sabbath is a great thing, and I'll probably keep talking

about it because I'm thinking about it a lot. But, but

sabbath, taking days off, off off, away from work off, is only

part of it. The other part of it is this sustained rest, this

continuous rest, rest as a continuous practice while also

working. And that's the thing that we have the most power to

support. So how are we going to do that?