I’ve always been bad at resting.
Like my dad, I prefer a vacation that involves lots of activities and sightseeing over parking myself in a beach chair all week. I can maybe do one or two beach days, for a couple hours at a time, before I get antsy.
As an adult, it isn’t that I never sit on the couch scrolling on my phone. It’s just what I do when I’ve been going, going, going and my brain burns itself out. I always think, “Isn’t there a way I can make this resting more productive?”
Growing up Catholic, I heard a lot about the Third Commandment: Keep the sabbath day holy. But I just assumed that meant I had to squeeze in a Mass on top of everything else I had to do on Sundays—mostly homework. Even once I was out of school, Sunday became my “reset day” before a busy week—the day for laundry and grocery shopping and cleaning. The way our modern industrial workplace is set up, there’s no way I could do these things during the week. Sundays became the day that I knew my social calendar was less likely to be filled, so I could finally clean the bathroom undisturbed.
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