Over the past year[1], since Covid-19 struck us, one of the things that has been a notable is … well, the lack of notable things. Specifically, we’ve been deprived of many of the occasions that we’d use to mark our year, or to break the day-to-day grind: family holidays, the ability to visit a favourite restaurant, festivals, concerts, sporting events, even popping round to enjoy drinks or a barbecue at a friend’s house. The things we’d look forward to as a way of breaking the monotony of working life – or even of just providing something a bit different to a job we actively enjoy – have been difficult to come by.
This has led to rather odd way of being. It’s easy either to get really, really stuck into work tasks (whether that’s employed work, school work, voluntary work or unpaid work such as childcare or household management), or to find yourself just doing nothing substantive for long stretches of time. You know: just scrolling down your favourite social media feed, playing random games on your phone – all the while feeling guilty that you’re not doing what you should be doing. I’ve certainly found myself doing the latter from time to time when I feel I should be working, and have overcompensated by forcing myself to work longer hours, or to check emails at 10pm when I should get thinking about heading to bed, for instance. So, like many of us, I think, I get stuck into one of two modes:
- messing around on mindless tasks, or
- working longer and harder than I should be.
The worse thing about the first of these is that I’m not really relaxing when I’m doing them, partly because much of my mind is on things which I feel I ought to be doing.
There are ways to try to fix this, one of which is to be careful about the hours you work or the tasks you perform, if you’re more task-oriented in the role you do, and then to set yourself non-work tasks to fill up the rest of the time. Mowing the lawn, doing the ironing, planting bulbs, doing the shopping, putting the washing out – the tasks that need to get done, but which you might to prefer to put off, or which you just can’t quite find time to do because you’re stuck in the messing/working cycle. This focus on tasks that actually need to be done, but which aren’t work (and divert you from the senseless non-tasks) has a lot to be said for it, and (particularly if you live with other people). It’s likely to provide social benefits as well (you’ll improve the quality of the environment you live in, or you’ll just get shouted at less), but it misses something: it’s not “down-time”.
By down-time, I mean time set aside specifically not to do things. It’s a concept associated with the word “Sabbath”, an Anglicisation of the Hebrew word “shabbat”, which can be translated as “rest” or “cessation”. I particularly like the second translation (though given my lack of understanding of Hebrew, I’m just going to have to accept the Internet’s word for the translation!), as the idea of ceasing what you’re doing, and making a conscious decision to do so, is something I think that it’s easy to miss. That’s true even in normal times, but with fewer markers in our lives for when to slow down and take time for ourselves – a feature of many of our lives in the world of Covid-19 – it’s all too simple just to forget, or to kid ourselves that those endless hours of brainless tapping or scrolling are actually some sort of rest for our minds and souls.
Whether you choose a whole day to rest/cease every week, set aside an hour after the kids have gone to bed, get up an hour early, give yourself half an hour over lunch to walk or cycle or do something else, it doesn’t matter. What I know I need to do (and I think it’s true of others, too), is to practice intentional laziness. This isn’t the same as doing things which you may find relaxing to some degree (I enjoy ironing, I know people who like cleaning the kitchen), but which need to be done: it’s about giving yourself permission not to do something. This can be really, really hard, particularly if you care for other people, have a long commute or a high pressure job, but it’s also really important for our longer-term well-being.
You also need to plan to be lazy. This seems counter-intuitive, at least to me, but if you haven’t set aside time and given yourself permission to relax and cease your other activities, you’ll feel guilty, and then you won’t be relaxing properly. Identifying a time to read a book, watch some low-quality boxsets, ring up a friend for a gossip on the phone or just have a “sneaky nap”, and then protecting that time is worthwhile. No – it’s more than worthwhile: it’s vital.
I’m aware, as I write this, that I’m in the very privileged position of being able to do this fairly easily[2], when for some people, it’s very difficult. Sometimes, we may need to defer these times and to plan a weekend away from the kids, a night out or an evening in front of the television for a week, or even a month or more from now. Planning it gives us something to hold on to, though: a break from the “everyday-ness” which can grind us down. But if we don’t have something to look forward to, a time that we protect, for ourselves, to be intentionally lazy, then our long-term physical, emotional and mental health will suffer.
1 – or two years, or maybe a decade. No-one seems to know.
2 – this doesn’t mean that I do, however.
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