A Spacious Life

Schneider, who goes by @SchneidRemarks on Twitter

(s-c-h-n-e-i-d remarks on Twitter) wrote a thread about

how he discovered when he accidentally took on a female

colleague's identity for a little while, that the reason

that she was less efficient, was because sexism. Because people

treated him so much differently, so much worse, so much more

skeptically, so much more resistantly, when they thought

he was a woman.

shelved it, I was busy. That same thread surfaced again, on

social media, as such things are wont to do, this week.

And I read it through and I remembered, realized, that he

was talking about a kind of efficiency that comes from a

lack of friction. From a lack of anticipating friction, from a

lack of encountering friction, from a lack of engaging

friction. And that got me thinking about the way I cleaned

my house a couple days ago. So a couple days ago, I was getting

ready for bed. And I looked at my sink full of dishes, and I

thought I could wash those. So I did. I've talked before about

how I have discovered that many tasks take less time than I

think they will and dishes are definitely one of them. I have

few enough dishes and a small enough sink and drying rack that

I can generally do all of my dishes in between five and 10

minutes, 10 minutes if it's a lot of dishes, or if there's

something that needs scrubbing. And that that's an amount of

time that I often spend standing in the kitchen anyway, because

I'm often waiting for a pan to heat up or the oven to preheat

or for something else; the microwave to run and so it's

actually really easy for me to do the dishes if I remember that

they only take five minutes. When I think that the dishes

take longer than five minutes or 10 minutes, when I build them up

into this thing that takes half an hour, or 45 minutes, or all

the energy I have, then I don't do the dishes. But they only

take five minutes. But after doing the dishes, I looked

around the kitchen and maybe it helped that I was watching a

YouTube about somebody who was trying some new house

maintenance routine thing. I am not a house maintenance routine

person. That is not how my house maintenance has ever worked. I

don't have routines, I don't have schedules, I don't do daily

tasks, I rebel at the very idea of a daily task. But anyway, I

was watching this video, just curious. I'm always curious

about what systems work for people and how they work because

even if they don't work for me, they might work for someone I

know, or for a client, or they might percolate through and

become a part of the way that I do something else. So I was

listening and I noticed that a lot of my countertop space, my

cutting board space was covered with off cuts from things like

onions and garlic and stem ends, and things like that, that that

really just belonged in the compost and I had noticed a

couple of days earlier that all of that stuff tended to fall off

the counter if I wasn't paying attention. And so I just put a

paper bag there to catch it as my compost bin. And now I can

just sweep it off the front of the counter into the bag at my

feet and when the bag is full, I can take the entire brown paper

bag out to the compost. It's a system that works pretty well.

It uses brown paper bags that I already have in the house, that

are already going to need to be used for something. And so I

just looked over my cutting board and I swept all those

cuttings into that brown paper bag that was already by the

cutting board, and then I looked around and noticed a few more

things, and picked up a few more things, and then I walked into

the dining room and noticed that, by comparison, the dining

room now felt pretty cluttered. And most of why the dining room

feels cluttered is because of what I pile on the dining table.

And so I played a game with myself that I sometimes play

called "One Thing I Know." Because so often my response to

a cluttered dining table is, I don't know what I'm supposed to

do with this stuff. I don't know where any of it goes. And then I

just kind of get overwhelmed and shut down. But instead, I play

this game called "One Thing I Know" where I look at the table.

And I say, "what's one thing I know about one thing on this

table?" So one thing I know is that this bowl from my lunch

belongs in the sink. One thing I know is that these five things

are paper waste, and can go into paper recycling. One thing I

know is that this piece of plastic is trash. And it goes in

the trash bag, which is right there. And so I sort of worked

my way through the dining room. And then I got to one thing I

know is this pile of clothes on the back of this chair can be

put away, I was like, Okay, well put away at least one thing. So

then I put away one thing, and then I put away a few more

things, because I was already putting things away, the closet

was open the hangers were there.

I puttered around for an hour, tidying, sorting and cleaning.

This is not me. This is not the way that I have built my life.

But I did it. And I kept checking in with myself to see

if I needed to go to bed, to see if I needed to rest, to see if

this was okay. Partially because it was unusual. And partially

because it's easy for me to shift from doing something

because I'm moved to do it to doing something because I feel

like I should do it. But no, it was it was still okay, so I kept

puttering. And after about an hour, hour and a quarter, I was

done. I could feel like I was done. It was bedtime, I have my

lights set to automatically turn themselves off to let me know

that it's bedtime. And unless I'm really absorbed in

something, that's usually a cue I'll notice. But as I was

getting into bed, I was observing how gentle that

cleaning process had felt, how unforced, how unfraught, it had

felt. And I realized that the reason that that was, is because

I had taken a fairly light workweek. I had worked, I've

been telling people almost not at all, but I think it was

probably like 10 to 15 hours instead of 40 hours or more. And

I had done work that was nourishing. And then I had

filled the rest of my time also with nourishing things. I had

taken the time to cook some food that I actually liked. I had

taken the time to go for some walks and take some pictures of

some pretty things that I saw outside, which is one of the

ways that I have practiced centering on beauty. Since

seminary. When I was grumpy about going to seminary in

Chicago. I had sworn I was never moving to Chicago and I was

never going to seminary. Be careful what you say you're

never doing. And so I made myself take my camera and take

pictures of things that looked unlike things that I thought I

would encounter in Chicago. Unlike my previous experiences

of Chicago. I took pictures of pads between buildings that

looked like English Country Garden pads, and I took pictures

of you know, tall grasses on a roundabout that made it look

like I was in the middle of the prairie, and I took pictures of

intricate architectural work and trees in bloom. And I like

cities but I need a certain amount of green around me. And

so I took a lot of pictures of things that were growing. It was

a good practice. I go back to it periodically. It's easier now;

when I did that practice, I was still using film. Now I can use

digital. Now I can take as many pictures as I want. Now I can

correct something that I cropped incorrectly in frame, and by

incorrectly I mean not the way I meant to.

But when I filled my week with all of these nourishing things,

and not with too many of them. When I left space for a certain

amount of staring at the wall, or lying under a tree and

staring at the needles high above me; when I left that

space, and then didn't work very much, I was not exhausted. And

when I was not exhausted, puttering and cleaning came

naturally. And I do mean naturally it, it just emerged

"Do I want to?" The answer was "yes, I do.

I want that." Which the next day led to me cooking more, which

the next day led to me being pleasantly surprised by the

state of my kitchen. I wish I could manage to do a little more

of that, all of that. Part of my challenge has been my entire

life that I have more stuff than places to put it. And the answer

is not getting rid of the stuff, in this particular case, I'm

using it. So this led me down two paths. One was thinking

about executive dysfunction, which I do believe is a real

thing. I'm not disputing that at all. But imagine, imagine if

some significant portion of what we're calling executive

dysfunction is actually straight-up fatigue. What if

it's just being tired, and extra tired from having to mask in

public, and extra tired from having to pretend to be things

for other people all the time? Or being on display all the

time? What if? What if we didn't have to do any of that? What if

we didn't do any of that? What if we spent a relatively small

fraction of our time in the public eye? What if we spent a

relatively small fraction of our time being observed and

evaluated by ourselves or others for work? What have we spent the

rest of our time in rest, in nourishment, in relaxation? I

know there are reasons why this is hard. But if we did... if we

were not so tired, if we were not so rushed, if we were not so

wedged into the corners of capitalism, the focus on

productivity, what else might emerge? What else might we be

urged to do? Because I felt so peaceful when I climbed into

bed. I felt so grounded and so peaceful. I was tired but not

exhausted. I wasn't bone-weary, I was just tired. I knew I

needed to go to sleep, it was bedtime.

And all of that came because I had had enough control over my

life and my schedule and my space, over the amount of

stimulation I had, and what kind of stimulation I had, over

everything. I had had enough control over the elements of my

life, that I could let everything emerge. At its own

time, at its own pace, at my own pace. I recognize that there's

incredible privilege in being able to do that even for an

hour, much less an entire week. And it hadn't been perfect at

all. There were many times during that week when I was

doing things that I didn't want to or in ways that I didn't want

to or things that weren't working right or whatever. But I

could feel as I went to bed that night after having spontaneously

cleaned for an hour, I could feel like the beginnings of the

grass growing up through the dirt in the spring. Just the the

little fuzzy, soft green tendrils of a different way of

being. What does this have to do with business? Well, it has

everything to do with business, right? Because what if, what if

our business models assumed that as a baseline human experience?

What if our business models assumed that everybody needed

restorative time, that all of that restorative time makes

people more productive? Because it does. But also, what if we

just did it because it's the right thing to do? What if

extracting productivity is not the right way to run a business?

What if it's not even ethical to be highly extractive? What are

the other ways we could think of businesses? What are the other

ways we could think of running our businesses and our lives, so

that they're so integrated, that we don't need sharp lines? So

that they nourish each other. So that we are so well-nourished

that we don't resent taking a moment here, or a moment there,

that we had planned for this, to do that. What if it's not

agitating, what if it's not stressful to change things?

Because the schedule is not that fall, there's room, there

spaciousness, there's possibility.

More and more people are saying it, that time is the actual peak

commodity. It's the one thing we can't make more of no matter

what we do. And so how we spend our time becomes the most

valuable thing. Time Off is often more valuable to people

than more cash, not always, it depends on their cash levels.

But if we think about running our businesses as places where

we assume that people need, say, three quarters of their week to

be self-nourishing; three quarters of their week to be

self-nourishing. And I mean, their waking hours, and then

they also need time to sleep. And then they can come to work.

We're looking at what a 20, maybe 25 Hour Workweek. The

unions should never have stopped at 40 hours, if they had

maintained their power, they probably wouldn't have. Forty

hours was a bare minimum, a bare minimum of time for the workers

in their lives. Eight, eight, eight. But we should be doing

better than that. We can do better than that. We can do

better than that for ourselves. That's why everybody is moving

toward wealth, people are leaning toward wealth. Not

because like holding cash money in your hand, is the best thing

in the world. But because that cash money in your hand gives

you the ability to work less, it gives you the ability to control

your schedule more. It gives you freedom, it gives you creativity

in some ways, it gives you the space, it gives you the space,

you need to be a full human. That's all people want, is to be

a full human. That's all we want. To be fully human.

Everybody, not just the people at the top. And so how do we run

our businesses so that everybody, every single person,

gets to feel fully human? How do we run our businesses so that

people are people, and not commodities? How do we give

everyone agency and control and space, so that we can find out

how they can truly shine for themselves, for themselves? And

maybe it's just rest. Maybe it's just rest. They don't owe us.

Nobody owes us. But we owe ourselves. We owe ourselves

this. How do we create businesses in a world where this

is everybody's norm? That's the question.