Resting in spite of Society!

We live in a frenetic, impatient culture.  The evidences are everywhere.  As a fan of sports, I marvel that we want to fire a coach after each loss, and we’re willing to crown someone a champion after each win.  If we watch a race, we rarely notice what the person running in 6^th place does, because he isn’t close enough to the front for us to pay attention.  When we drive, we are unwilling to allow someone to get in front of us, as that may delay our arrival by at least 15 seconds, but we are greatly offended if someone does not allow us to cut in.  In pregnancy, we want to induce a baby’s arrival, if it is a day beyond the due date.  In Presidential elections, we want to know now what people are doing, despite the fact that we don’t really need to make up our mind for over a year (I realize it’s only 6-9 months for primaries, but still).   We value someone being on time as a virtue and cast out someone who is unwilling to show up on time with the proverbial garbage.  We make rash decisions on almost any topic and then are disinclined to listen to evidence to the contrary.  We create ways to better use our time, like books on tape and on-hold music.  We’ve created cell phones so we can always reach people.  Then talking wasn’t enough, so we created phones that could look at computer documents.

As a member of this culture, I know that at least a few of you were anxious to skip some of my examples and get right to the meat of the article.  And while I continued just a bit longer than may have been necessary, I am quite confident that there is something to Redeeming the Time and making each moment count.  It is true that our time is somewhat limited.  But I assert that this is a crazy way to go through life.

My sister posed the question today about when we feel most relaxed.  As I thought of my answer, I was not sure if there was a discernible difference between when I was relaxed and when I was the antithesis thereof.  This got me to thinking, "Is it healthy to live life in such a way?"  I am not sure this is completely answerable in a few words, but I think there should be times of relaxation and times of high productivity.  My friend, Mark Fields, used to call it working at multiple speeds.  He liked it when people could pick up the pace, as it allowed them to have stretches, where we were busy, of high productivity, so we could make sure to get the job accomplished.

Personally, I think times of relaxation lead to those times of high productivity.  The 4^th commandment, for crying out loud, is to keep the Sabbath holy.  God rested on the 7^th day (with apologies to all you framework guys), after creating the world.  Of course, putting up with all these free-thinking people he created was the bigger task that he rested up for.:)  It is with that in mind that I think relaxation needs to be taken seriously.  And by relaxation, it needs to be a break from your normal tasks.  We need to relax and we need to do it well.

So, if you are one to worry about a dirty house, either put blinders on and not worry for 24 hours or just make sure you get it clean the day before.  I'm not trying to set up a legalistic standard, but I think that we would all benefit from a real good relaxation day.  I will join you all in setting up a designated relaxation day.  It will make us so much more productive.  Of course now that I've written one on relaxing, I guess I need six blogs on how important work is.  Yikes!