Disengaging

I took a nap yesterday. A nap! It’s been years since I’ve taken an actual nap. We ditched our plans to head to the whitewater center and had a lazy Sunday instead. Because, as it turns out, living life to the fullest on Sundays leads to continuous scheduled fun which, as it turns out, can also lead to exhaustion. So, every once in a while, (as it turns out), we need to stop and recharge our fun batteries. To let our minds wander, to practice idling.

You’d be surprised how difficult it is not to accomplish something. I mean, “have fun” is an agenda item in our lives. And so, if we’re not doing that, then we need to do something else on our list! Clean, preserve food, mow, etcetera ad infinitem. It takes a sheer force of will to idle. To just rest. To be.

It’s not habit alone that we must overcome, there’s also the guilt. The “I shoulds”. One of my favorite phrases, I think coined by Glennon Doyle, but maybe by Abby Wambach, is: “be careful not to should all over yourself!” Ha! It’s surely a cultural problem. The whole “Idle hands are the devil’s playthings” mindset. Who came up with that anyway?

The ‘shoulds’ and habit and culture all gang up on us to keep us in gear and the clutch is burnt out from fighting them. But Sunday we prevailed. We repaired the clutch. We disengaged. We took a nap.