When we were in Jerusalem, we stayed with an Orthodox Jew named David (pronounced Dah-VEED, there). He was eccentric but kind. Two of us were assigned to make Shabbat dinner like the Orthodox do, following the Rabbinical Kosher laws. The foremost rule was that they had to be done cooking by sundown.
When it was nearly five, the Shabbat horn sounded. You could hear it all across the city. “Turn off the stove,” said David. “You're done.” However, dinner wasn't finished. One of the dishes still needed to cook. “It's time to light the candle,” David said.
We did without that last dish. One of the cooks cried. It was among the most stressful experiences in a year of travel, she said.
However, it taught me something important: sometimes you have to make sacrifices to protect your rest.
Every Saturday, I turn off my computer at 6:00 pm. I don't email, use facebook, write. Instead, I rest. I read books. I hang out with my wife.
However, last night, I didn't get home from work until 6:06 PM. I hadn't written a blog post for Sunday morning. I had a choice to break my rest or make a sacrifice. I decided to just break my rest a little bit and began writing this post. I quickly realized the hypocrisy of my situation. I turned my computer off.
If you want to live this lifestyle, you have to make sacrifices. You have to turn off. You have to unplug. You have to say no.
Rest is for you. It's a gift to your soul. And if you cut corners when you give to yourself, you'll cut corners on everything.
Joe, your Sunday focus is truly a cool thing. When I was growing up, my parents had a hard fast rule: no homework on Sundays. And, all the way up through the fifth grade, my sister and I had to literally stay in our beds for a minimum of an hour and a half. Funny, we never fought it. Though we never had admitted it to our friends, it was a kind of security: amidst our efforts to get good grades and be popular, we always had that time where nothing else mattered. When we got older, we sometimes we had to get up at 4 am Monday morning to cram for an exam, but it was a fair trade-off. Even back then I knew my parents were on to a good thing. A pile of my favorite books on the bed, with clear instructions to read them — or fall asleep trying.
That’ll make an book junkie out just about any kind of kid.
Perhaps your weekly testament to rest will encourage more people to make such a radical choice. I highly recommend it!! Enjoy your work week 🙂
Hi Kati. Your Sunday routine sounds incredible. I didn’t such a routine, even though I’d toyed with the idea before, until I was in Jerusalem and saw the streets clear out on Friday night. It was eerie but witnessing that devotion to a day of eating, sleeping, and hanging out with people, even if that meant a few sacrifices, was life changing for me. I wish I had had this routine growing up.
Sometimes positive beliefs and habits we don’t adopt until we are adults make us more zealous about following them….because we’ve lived another way that doesn’t work so hot. Especially, like in your case, when you come upon the beliefs in such a powerful way. How awesome to see an entire city close down to live differently for a day.
Since leaving home, I’ve always tried to be “balanced” about the Sunday day of rest (no extreme lifestyle choices for me, thank you very much mom and dad!). I don’t have work meetings, I don’t do work on my computer. But my choice to live with few restraints has kept me from perhaps a better way: a laser beam focus on substitution. (not just no homework…it’s bed, and books, and soul-filling silence!) So, it’s like I’ve only gotten half the benefit that I did as a kid.
After months of ingesting your Sunday posts, and feeling your passion as i do, the idea has gradually seeped into my brain that perhaps the extreme sport of Sabbath rest can be relevant, and cool (not just parental :-)) and worthy of careful choices each week. Cheers!
I love that my craziness is seeping into you.
Great point, Joe!
When I was struggling to find the time to write, someone advised me to treat my writing as a job. Clock in at the same time each day; consider it as important work.
Now, as writing and marketing has consumed my day, your advice is dead on: don’t forget to clock out!
That’s a great way to put it Dane. We take our work with us everywhere we go, especially if we do a lot of our writing on our computers. And it comes down to this, if you don’t clock out, how can you really clock in again.
Joe, that’s a little too radical and strictly structured for me. One of the most important allures of writing for me is the freedom and flexibility it affords. I like your style though.
I appreciate your comment, Charles. It IS radical, and it might not be for everyone. I’ve found that it has improved my relationship both with my writing, my friends and family, and myself. However, for you it sounds like writing IS rest. So maybe your day would look a little different than mine.
I’m not sure whether I write for myself or for others. I keep a daily journal. Sometimes the writing consists of the things I did that day, other times it consists of the thoughts that went through my mind. Mainly, I just want to leave a record of past times, whether it be for myself when I get older (to remember), or for others to read after I’m gone to know the kind of person I was.
Since I can’t run or do things that others do (due to a car accident when I was young) I live vicariously through my writing. I’ve been writing since before I got out of the hospital.
I think that’s a good way to put the question. If you’re writing for yourself, is it restful? Your answer sounds like, yes, it is.
I journal rarely, but I do journal on my rest day sometimes.
if you cut corners when you give to yourself, you’ll cut corners on everything.
This really got to me…
Recently I left an 18 year relationship, oddly enough with someoneone who’s last name is David. It was a very hard decision. I am very loyal and my vows meant everything to me. I believe in for better or worse and believed right up to the end that we could make it through the “worse”, especially because the “better had been wonderful.
Over the course of a couple of years I gave my everything to the relationship. I stayed home rather than work at David’s request because the job he worked demanded that he be away for long hours and his schedule was always changing. He wanted me THERE on the days and during the hours that he was not working. We had raised my three children(from a previous marriage) and both had worked multiple jobs to get through those years, and once the children were grown and out of the house and he got this new job we decided together that I would relax (as if caring for a home and moving every 2 years was relaxing)
Although I was very happy and content to travel and give myself to David completely, there was a constant yearning with in me to go back to school and finish the degree I had tried to complete during the past twenty years. I worked and attended a class here and there and felt that with the children raised that this was MY time to complete my dream. But I contented myself with my wifely duties and read like one crazed and wrote stories and used my journal to fill my hours… these activities made me very happy but I began to feel empty, especially as I felt David begin to pull away, and we became les and less intimate.
Three years ago we moved to Shreveport and bought a beautiful old house in a lovely neighborhood. I had lots to do fixing up the old place and settling into sleepy Shreveport. For a time I was happy, but then David began his travels again and to top it off his mother came to shreveport and moved into a house a few doors down. His mother began to expect more and more of David’s time and find fault with how I kept house, cooked and took care of David. It was very diminishing for me when David began to let his mother do all the things for him that took up my time and gave me fulfillment.
Finally I decided that since my efforts were not appreciated I registered at LSUS. I had a feeling that David had been cheating for a few years but he always denied it and I believed him in my heart, but my brain and intuition knew he was lying. School became not only the fulfillment of my dream and long time goal, it became my distraction from my personal life. But it made David jealous and bitter and even closer to his mother.
I was doing very well in school…3.7 GPA and the dean’s list the last semester I was there. I loved the environment and being around people and the challenge of learning. (as a 55 year old i found that studying and performing well were a lot harder than it had been when I was younger).
Things declined with my personal relationship as each semester went by. In August after pleading with David to talk to me and share his thoughts and feelings and try to FIX our relationship I knew he did not want to be with me. The distance between us had grown into a chasim that he would not cross. He did not want to go to counseling and completely shut me out. And I discovered that he was cheating and had been for many years. I was devestated. I had given meverything I had and more and felt that I had become a shadow. I felt that my love was something I had been hiding behind and once I realized that it was not returned anymore, I left.
Classes had just started, and I had just picked up my Financial Aid check so I had a little money. One day three of classes I went home and tried to study but kept reading the same paragraph over and over… I couldn’t eat, or sleep or study or communicate with “my love”. I sat on the screened porch for hours that last night, smoking cigarette after cigarette praying for guidance and trying to think of a way to do what was best for me.
Suddenly I heard/felt my father’s voice (dad has been deceased for 10 years) from deep inside me say, “Bethy, the more shit you take the more shit you get.” And I knew I had to leave and make it on my own. I knew there were reasons that I had lived as a”ghost” for all those years and that I had to find the answers inside of me.
I went into my study, wondering what should I take with me and my gaze landed on a small altar I had in there. I saw my statue of the virgin Mary and the statue of the Buddah and knew I would take nothing. It had all come from David and would only be a reminder of him and the years I felt at that time I had wasted.
I left Shreveport at 3a.m. that morning. I told David softly and simply that I deserved more that his cheating and lying. That I was strong and smart and healthy and could make it on my own, and that I was leaving. (a part of me hoped that he would ask me to stay and tell me he loved me and we could work it out, but he didn’t). So with a broken heart I left with the clothes on my back, my FA funds, my passport and drove away in my 1983 Mercedes Benz. My heart was torn out but funny at the same time my soul was soaring. I knew I was finally doing the right thing for me.
What has happened since September first is a whole other story, but I did and am surviving. I’m staying in a little place, wearing borrowed clothes, sleeping on a borrowed airmattress, watching borrowed VHS movies on a borrowed TV and reading borrowed books. I writing everyday and going crazy looking for a job (tough at 55 it seems). My FA funds are about depleted. It is very difficult and at times I want to give up. But I know there is no going back and foward motion sustains me.
I have learned so much about myself, childhood demons and especially why I stayed with a cheater and believed and lived with his lies. I’ve learned that my worth will never be based on someone else, that I was lied to so that I would learn to eventually trust myself and my intuition, and I learned and have come to believe that sometimes good things fall apart so that better things can fall together.
All of my learning and (what I call) relavations have come in times of highest pain and stress but ONLY when I put it all aside, all the lonliness, money problems and self doubts, all the empty job hunting, and took time to REST.
When I quiet my mind (during prayer and meditation- which is my daily habit now that I don’t have David mocking me for it anymore) and feel the goodness and love that dwells in the deepest part of me and is my source of peace and divinity and stregnth… when I become a “cup” waiting and ready for the universe to “fill” me, I am Zoomed with pride and dignity and self worth and believe so strongly that I will make it through no matter what…. I am most my strongest self and KNOW with everything inside that there is a rhyme and reason for me… and so I go on, convinced that I will (someday when I find work and save some $$) finish school and maybe even find someone to partner with again… but someone who deserves me this time 🙂
So, YES, to rest, YES to down time and just doing nothing at a set time each week or each day. I’m still reading as if one crazed. I’m still writing everyday and still job hunting 8 hours a day… but when I rest, when I just STOP sometimes I find my faith and courage and wisdom and create the divine me.
sorry about the typos… but this just poured out of me and I knew if I re-read it b4 posting that I would not send it. I knew I would edit it and edit it and I wanted the emotion and truth to be the driver… not my perfectionism…
This was such an honor, to share in your honest story. Thank you for resisting the urge to edit. We are a deeper community because of your candor!
Thanks, Kati…..Writing has always been a form of therapy for me and it seems when it flows (like this did) it comes from my inner voice.
Like my highest self talking to my earthly self…
I love the writing practice… great tips, and as you say great community. I read yesterday, “Be honest. You may not make a lot of friends but the ones you do make will be real ones.”
Great quote. Here are three of my personal favs to add to the honesty arsenal:
*Worse than telling a lie is spending the rest of your life staying true to a lie. ~Robert Brault
*The truth brings with it a great measure of absolution, always. ~R.D. Laing
* Honesty is the first chapter of the book of wisdom. ~Thomas Jefferson
There’s so much here and I am surely not qualified to say much more than thank you. Thank you for sharing this part of your life with us. Thank you for valuing yourself. Thank you for seeking to better yourself and the world.
Joe, I love your Sunday sabbath “Rest” posts. This one is particularly good. Great writing.
Thanks Tyler 🙂
I’ll never forget the one and only Shabat sundown we saw during our short stay in Jerusalem, several years ago. Mid to late-afternoon that Friday caught us traipsing down Ben Yehuda to Yafo, and onward toward the western corner of the old city.
But the streets were strangely silent as our shadows grew longer. We three gentiles of Occident are, and we continued to trudge cluelessly toward our destination, which would be a place to have dinner, thinking that somewhere near the shadow of David’s ancient wall there may be a nonobservant establishment where we could celebrate not being hungry.
The thickening silence that pervaded the sacred City caught us unprepared, and it was with a sense of trepid relief that my son finally said, as darkness engulfed us, “Oh, there’s a tapas bar across the street, and it’s open.”
But Pat and I , hapless American tourists as we are, had never heard of a tapas bar, and didn’t know what it was, so we misunderstood what Micah had said.
“Absolutely not,” said my wife. “We will not have dinner in Jerusalem at a topless bar!”
And so we did not have dinner at an immoral establishment. But we did eat some good Spanish cuisine that filled our goyish bellies, while most of west Jerusalem was observing their time-honored evening meal tradition. Shabat shalom and mazel tov.
The next day, the Muslims let us go up onto the Temple mount, where the Al Aqsa is. I suppose that is a privilege that Jews do not share, especially on a Saturday. After walking past the very blue Dome of the Rock, we came to the eastern gate of the Old City. It was blocked up solid.
But it won’t always be.
I’ll never forget the one and only Shabat sundown we saw during our short stay in Jerusalem, several years ago. Mid to late-afternoon that Friday caught us traipsing down Ben Yehuda to Yafo, and onward toward the western corner of the old city.
But the streets were strangely silent as our shadows grew longer. We three gentiles of Occident are, and we continued to trudge cluelessly toward our destination, which would be a place to have dinner, thinking that somewhere near the shadow of David’s ancient wall there may be a nonobservant establishment where we could celebrate not being hungry.
The thickening silence that pervaded the sacred City caught us unprepared, and it was with a sense of trepid relief that my son finally said, as darkness engulfed us, “Oh, there’s a tapas bar across the street, and it’s open.”
But Pat and I , hapless American tourists as we are, had never heard of a tapas bar, and didn’t know what it was, so we misunderstood what Micah had said.
“Absolutely not,” said my wife. “We will not have dinner in Jerusalem at a topless bar!”
And so we did not have dinner at an immoral establishment. But we did eat some good Spanish cuisine that filled our goyish bellies, while most of west Jerusalem was observing their time-honored evening meal tradition. Shabat shalom and mazel tov.
The next day, the Muslims let us go up onto the Temple mount, where the Al Aqsa is. I suppose that is a privilege that Jews do not share, especially on a Saturday. After walking past the very blue Dome of the Rock, we came to the eastern gate of the Old City. It was blocked up solid.
But it won’t always be.
Loved this story, Carey. Thank you.
Good on you Joe! I’m proud of you. Rest is in short supply in the 24/7 gerbil wheel.
Devotion is the quiet fire of the heart, burning sure and steady.
Beautiful, Bob. I like that.
Thanks Joe for regularly reminding me of the importance of switching off. I would like to know more about your weekly pattern which enables you to be able to do this.
You must in some way have a method in which you organise life that you are able to achieve this. When do you plan your week? How do you prioritise various aspects of your life.
‘Rest is for you. It’s a gift to your soul. And if you cut corners when you give to yourself, you’ll cut corners on everything.’
I am a quote collecto-maniac. I just cant help myself! I then use the quote with an image from Flickr to create a desktop background. The image below comes from http://www.flickr.com/photos/34463341@N00/476245464/
Thanks, Joe, for not only encouraging us to rest but for showing us how by your example. I’ve become aware recently of how easily my rest can be stolen if I’m not 100% committed to keeping it. It might be a chore I’ll convince myself I have to do or an activity that I get caught up in and later realize I was double-dipping in a reserve that doesn’t have unlimited resources. This rest thing is harder to master than I would have thought. Addiction to busyness has become a habit, I must admit.
Addiction to busyness. That’s a great way to put it, Ruth. Thanks for stopping by and commenting. I hope you get some good rest time this week!