Unlearning overwork: Embracing Sacred Rest

I was supposed to be playing ultimate frisbee with my women’s league team tonight but instead I was sitting on a bench at the playground beside the fields crying my eyes out on the phone to my father. About work. About how I had way too much to do. I was co-teaching my first semester-long course with a colleague at UBC and the pressure to be ready, prepared, on, awesome, two or three mornings a week for my students, was so much. To be awesome for my colleague, who I was supposed to be helping learn about interactive teaching methods. I knew all the things about how to design and teach a really great active learning course and we were transforming it and I was leading that, and I had beautiful plans, beautiful dreams about how to innovate and make the course awesome. And instead I was just a pile of deep sobs and stress, sitting on the bench at the playground, feeling like I couldn’t be ready, I couldn’t push myself to be ready again for tomorrow. And if I managed it one more time, I wouldn’t be able to do it again, and again, and again, and again, through the term.

Have you been there?

I invite you to take a deep breath with me.

<Breathe>

If you want, I invite you also to join me in lighting a candle, and saying a prayer as you blow out the match. That’s what I just did, to start writing this post.

It’s a beautiful thing to want to create an awesome class, an effective and supportive experience for our students, an equitable and inclusive workplace. Yes. And. We so often push ourselves too hard, and/or feel super strong pressure and expectations on us to work too hard, from our academic departments, from society. I think these pressures probably exist in most areas of work, and I think they are especially insidious in sectors that are about helping people, like teaching and equity work. We are here because we want to do awesome things to help our students, and there’s always more that can be done. We can reach out to a few students who haven’t been in class lately. We can create a new interactive activity. We can ask a colleague for feedback on a class session. We can take a workshop on incorporating Indigenous ideas into our curricula. We can brainstorm ways to grade more fairly and equitably. We can give more feedback to students on an assignment. We can read an article (or blog post!) about teaching. We can reflect and write in a teaching journal. We can advocate for more equitable admissions and hiring processes to our departments. And many folks have additional work expectations on top of teaching expectations: advising students, writing grants, doing research, serving on committees. We want to do those things well too.

But there’s too much to do. I’ve been talking with a bunch of physics and astronomy faculty who are doing EDI (equity, diversity and inclusion) work through several projects I’m part of (e.g., APS-IDEA), and a very common theme is not having enough time and burnout. With the extra difficult twist that the people who care the most about EDI tend to be the most overcommitted people — they put deep care into all of their work and so are trying to do way too much, and getting exhausted. From myself, and so many friends and colleagues who are academics and educators: everyone is exceedingly busy, and tired. I’ve been there too: the scene I set above at the frisbee field in 2016 was not isolated, and in 2021 I experienced a very difficult period (of work burnout and other things) that included being unable to work for months. When I was considering taking time off to heal, I kept thinking that was “indulgent.” And it’s not just academics of course. I was struck the other day in yoga class when the instructor encouraged us all to let our stress melt into the floor. So very many of us feel stressed.

When we’re exhausted all the time, we don’t have the space to dream. Of beautiful visions of amazing and liberated worlds we want to create together. To create, for the Joy of it. To try something, change our minds, and try something else. To think outside ten boxes. To be deeply courageous. To do surprising things. To sit in silence and beingness and gratitude and even joy for exactly where we are, right now, in its fullness.

The American theologian Thomas Merton wrote,

“There is a pervasive form of contemporary violence to which the idealist most easily succumbs: activism and overwork. The rush and pressure of modern life are a form, perhaps the most common form, of its innate violence. To allow oneself to be carried away by a multitude of conflicting concerns, to surrender to too many demands, to commit oneself to too many projects, to want to help everyone in everything, is to succumb to violence. The frenzy of our activism neutralizes our work for peace. It destroys our own inner capacity for peace. It destroys the fruitfulness of our own work, because it kills the root of inner wisdom which makes work fruitful.”

During that period in 2021, one of the spiritual gifts I received from Beyond was a set of eight spiritual principles for living my life, and one of those is Sacred Rest. It’s not easy, but I’m on a journey of slowly learning how to live it.

Here are some pieces of that journey for me, that I hope might resonate for you too.

Note: I attended a workshop a couple of weeks ago called “Liberating our Time” by Whiteness at Work. Some of the ideas and resources I’m sharing below are drawn from or inspired by that workshop. Thank you, Adaway Group!

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1. Recognizing the capitalist and colonial origins of overwork. There are a diversity of ways of thinking about and relating to time.

“This constant sense of urgency, and this constant frantic expectation for work, comes from a capitalist and colonial relationship to time.” So says Larissa Crawford in this powerful piece called “Time Is A Colonial Construct — Here’s How I Learned To Reclaim Mine.” 

In this podcast on Rest as Resistance, Tricia Hersey says, “To not rest is really being violent towards your body, to align yourself with a system that says your body doesn’t belong to you, keep working, you are simply a tool for our production.” Her message is for all of us in capitalist society; she especially focuses on the importance of rest for descendants of enslaved Black people.

So how much “should” we be working? What we in North America are used to as a “typical” 40-hour work-week is of course a human-made construct. (And of course many academics would love to work “only” 40 hours, spending 50, 60, 70+ hours on work per week.) This article describes the origins of the 40-hour work week in the US, which came from collective bargaining and laws to reduce the number of hours for overworked factory laborers.

But the way dominant culture in North America currently thinks about time is not the only way. Different cultures think about time in different ways, throughout the world and history. From the Liberating our Time workshop, I learned about the ideas of “monochronic” and “polychronic” orientations to time. Dominant culture in North America and Northern/Western Europe takes a monochronic orientation to time. There are of course diverse ways of thinking about time within each of these categories, and within any cultural group, but (acknowledging this is a generalization): Many Indigenous, African, Asian, Latin American, and Southern European cultures take polychronic orientations to time.

Here’s a comparison of these orientations from Whiteness at Work. (There’s some good discussion in this article too: Everything about time – Monochronism – Polychronism – Orientation.)

When I read these lists, I feel like, monochronic feels like what you’re “supposed to do,” what you have to do to be “serious,” while polychronic feels like what my heart and soul want — how my heart and soul already are, but monochronic is something imposed on top. Monochronic feels like an externally constructed system of time, while polychronic feels like listening to ourselves. What do you feel?

Monochronism is connected to capitalism and colonialism in deep ways that I’m just learning about. In monochronism, time is people’s labor, a resource to be extracted from us. Polychronism is depicted as less enlightened, less civilized. Colonial powers imposed and continue to impose monochronism on Indigenous people and societies, using it as a tool of oppression towards the goal of extraction. (My understanding is that even colonial powers that take more of a polychronic time orientation for themselves imposed monochronic time for extraction on the people they colonized and enslaved.)

For settlers as well, individual productivity is held up as an ideal for how to live our lives, and a measure of our worth. This paradigm is not quite so physically forced on us, but rather becomes insidiously part of our own psyches as we absorb it through culture all around us. This is harmful for all of us — we all feel not-good-enough, unable to reach or maintain this “ideal” level of productivity — and is particularly harmful for people whose bodies are unable to work that hard, to be that productive. 

“Cripping time” is a way of thinking about time from the disability community. In Cripping Time At Work, Katie Walsh writes that “it is the idea that people simply move, think, and speak at their own pace… understanding that our value as workers—furthermore, as people—is not tied inextricably to our ability to produce on an able-bodied timeline.”

Another idea that resonates for me, inspired by reading about Indigenous ways of relating to time (e.g., Larissa Crawford’s article), is that time and work can be seasonal, moving with Nature. To me it makes sense that we might work differently, different amounts and schedules and types of work, at different points during the year. I feel differently about working in the darker, rainier winter months than I do during the summer. Isn’t there even something liberating to feel it could be totally valid — not subversive or secret — to say, it’s a beautiful sunny day today, I’m going to go for a hike instead of working, and I’ll maybe do some more work another time when it’s raining? This clear night with a beautiful full Moon and low tide would be a great night to stay up late and dance at the beach, which means not starting work early the next morning.

There’s a ton to learn here about colonialism and capitalism and time, and different ways of thinking about time. Just knowing that is a step of liberation for me.

2. Creating the boundaries we need, and celebrating ourselves for expressing them.

I asked at the workshop: What can I say to faculty who want to do great EDI work but feel they don’t have enough time? Desiree Adaway replied: EDI (and I could add: education) is a long game. If we burn ourselves out, we aren’t going to be able to do the work of transforming towards a more just and equitable society. We need to take care of ourselves while doing EDI work, teaching, etc. The urgency of EDI work is very real, and can feel in tension with this. It’s helpful to name and grapple with that tension.

I’m learning how to figure out what boundaries I need and want around work-time, and how to express them to relevant people around me. And not just boundaries of dire necessity, when things are starting to feel really bad and I’m super exhausted, but long before that. I recognize that I have many deep expectations about how society / colleagues think I should orient to time (whether or not I agree), and fears about both expressing my boundaries — and about not expressing them 🙂 I also recognize that my boundaries flex and evolve, and that’s awesome. I’m trying to high-five myself for saying no to things, and also for saying yes-and to things: there are lots of ways to work together with colleagues to figure out a path that works well timewise for everyone. It can all be more flexible than I realize I’ve been thinking.

Developing and gently but proudly owning my identity of how I orient to time (something two friends recently encouraged me to do) is both scary and empowering.

3. Healing ourselves and listening to our hearts and bodies.

Sometimes I repeat (or sing!) a mantra like I am Enough. I remind myself of my worth as a whole human being, not just/primarily my work.

Sometimes I touch my heart and ask myself the question, What do my heart and soul and body want for how I work? We are educators: it’s not that we don’t want to work, to teach, to do good things for our students and colleagues and the world. Rather it’s the question, What would that work look like if we could shape it exactly the way that our bodies and our hearts and our souls are calling for? 

Since that tearful evening at the frisbee field, I’ve been reorganizing my workday, my work schedule, and my expectations for myself within my constraints, while also working to free myself from those constraints.

For example, I’ve learned that I’m usually most productive in the morning, and that I am happiest and work best when I can look out a big window and gaze at trees and sky. So I plan my “hard” work in the morning, and have found big windows where I can work. Then I need to stretch and move my body, so I often have a short walk. I plan my meetings in the afternoons when I can. I have different types of work that I do, e.g., more creative, more analytical, more individual, more social, some for my own joy (like writing this!) and some for others. During the day and week, I try to feel what kind of work I’m in the mood for and move back and forth between those, while getting done what “needs” to get done when it “needs” to. These are often affected by how well I slept the night before, and I try to take a gentler schedule if I don’t sleep well, where I can. When I transition between blocks of work in a day, I often pause a moment for some deep grounding breaths and a short prayer.

I try to have gratitude for and acknowledge the great privileges that help me be able to take these kinds of steps for myself right now. Even just in small ways, I try to help others to have more freedom and rest, too, and aspire to do that more. This is part of acting collectively (more in #4).

I’m putting all of this after #2 because I’ve found we often need to put in boundaries first, to create the space to be able to breathe and heal.

4. Acting collectively. 

This is about societal transformation, not just about individual changes. We are not at all alone in experiencing time challenges. Talking about it normalizes that struggle. When we express boundaries and choose self-care, that’s inspiring to everyone to see, helps others feel stronger to do the same. Larissa Crawford (and others) call for decolonizing time.

As we ask others to honor our self-care, our heart-led timelines, it’s an invitation for us to honor others’ self-care and timelines as well. What could it look like to do that for our colleagues? How do I do this well in some contexts, and what resistance comes up in me in other contexts?

What could it look like to truly honor our students’ own timelines? (The Covid-19 pandemic gave us some glimpses of this.) To decolonize time in our classrooms, in our education system? I think it involves more flexibility, more compassion, and less power-hierarchy between students and teachers — and is ultimately a pretty radical transformation. Decolonization efforts should of course be led by Indigenous folks.

5. Experiencing joy, reflecting, and dreaming.

This is about relishing and taking great joy in my work when I have the right energy for it, and it is the right time for me to do it! I can deeply love what I get to do in my work, and that’s amazing. Watching more of that joyful work-energy flow for me when I am taking enough rest.

This is about dreaming about amazing worlds we could create, self-reflecting, and listening to others. For me as a white person wanting to do EDI work, I need to take space to really be introspective about places where I might be contributing to or profiting from white supremacy and other systems of marginalization, feeling defensive, and working with those feelings… because they are difficult and it’s hard to look at them. If we’re exhausted all the time, then we’re not going to be able to do that well. Trying to take time to educate myself, listen to people of color and other marginalized communities, engage in sensemaking, understand nuance. Dreaming myself, listening to others’ dreaming, and dreaming together.

Overlapping, not separately: This is also about enjoying the time and space that I’m setting out to preserve for myself. Dancing, meditating, praying, sitting in stillness, having an unhurried conversation with a friend, watching something silly on Netflix, cooking a nice meal, taking a long bike ride.

Remembering that it’s not just about moving away from harmful conceptions of time, but moving towards more beautiful soulful ones.

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I wish you well on your journey.

“Exuberant is existence, time a husk.
When the moment cracks open, ecstasy leaps out and devours space;
love goes mad with the blessings…
Be kind to yourself, dear.”

Rumi

I acknowledge that I live and this writing took place on the unceded, ancestral, traditional territory of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh First Nations, also known as Vancouver, Canada. I identify as a white-European cis-woman settler, immigrant to Canada, child of immigrants to the United States. My identity, history, experiences, and place all shape my lens on what I’ve shared here.

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How do you think about time, work and rest? 

I’d be grateful for any thoughts and feedback you’d like to share with me on this piece. Thank you so much for reading.