#oldcontent

As a child I was frustrated that on Saturdays we didn’t do anything because we were Seventh Day Adventists and we had the concept of a Sabbath. This was frustrating because I couldn’t do the things that I wanted to do. Most Saturday afternoons were spent by my parents napping because it was the end of a week and they needed rest. However, we were kids and we didn’t understand that this was actually a good idea. 

I’m a little older now and I’m fully a proponent of naps and no time to take them. The idea of the Sabbath is the most visceral thing that I miss. The rest of my background and former faith identity comes and goes in its intensity. But the idea that now that I’ve left that version of faith behind means that I have also left behind the intentional rest period is something that I want to institute back into my life and I often cannot. Hospitality, where I work is unforgiving, between that and a full time university degree I have gone weeks without significant periods of rest because the next thing just comes along and needs to be solved. It never really ends. 

I was completing assignments hours before I was supposed to go on placement. And I had just finished paid work. It's no wonder that I miss it. It's something that most working adults do get some version of but in this whirlwind of unpaid placements and full time university work and the fact that I have to pay endless continuous bills I don’t get the luxury of. And if we are honest with ourselves, the stresses of modern life are stripping those periods of rest away from those other working adults - it has increasingly become a luxury. 

I took a holiday because I knew that the bullshit couldn’t last forever, and it was a sabbath from a state and its associated worries but it was also a sabbath away from the people I loved and kept me there. So I'm back now. And the bullshit is still here. The reminders of failure because I didn’t have the time to rest are catching up on me now. That is why I write. The sabbath came at a relief and rest but it also generated its own concerns. 

Work for the sake of work, without sabbaths from mind and body is not the way that things have to continue. In ecology - plants and other non-human beings are afforded periods of rest and recuperation in a way that I don't think that our society appreciates or at least in their most natural forms. I’ve worked in industries that are relied upon for other people’s sabbaths and never their own. I am angry and disappointed that this continuous workload is the expectation and the norm. Rather than just an abnormality in times of crisis and maybe this shouldn’t continue. We are in a crisis - or the intersection of a few. The idea that this is inevitable is something that I am groaning against.