I decided to spend a week -a Sabbatical week – resting. What does that mean, exactly? It meant not editing, mostly, and spending as much time as possible reading and thinking over what I’d read, or recently observed. It meant staying mostly off the Internet, which has a way of sucking your attention in greedily and begrudgingly relinquishing it only after you realize you’re late to do something else.
It involved making a lot of lists; grocery lists, lists of errands (go to the grocery store), lists of books to read, pieces to edit (for a non-Sabbatical week), thinks to pick up at the pharmacy, things to buy when the weather cools down. The lists keep those things from spiraling in your head, freeing up space to think. I thought about the past month of travel and tried to write a travelogue, failed, and started writing this.
The German holiday on Thursday helped, something to do with the Hapsburgs and celebrating Jesus’ body. Why it’s in June, I don’t quite know. In any case, all the stores were closed, all the houses being renovated in the neighborhood were quiet, and the entire town paused for a lazy, not-quite-summer day.
The philosopher Josef Pieper, an Austrian and therefore familiar with seemingly random holidays, traces leisure time back to holidays being the feast days of the gods. Perhaps the gods, or the Hapsburgs, wanted to simply pause and enjoy the warmth of a late spring day, and thereby we have a holiday. By Pieper’s reasoning, the Sabbatical is a form of ‘rest’ but not leisure because the purpose of the Sabbatical is to take a break from work, in order to work more fully and efficiently when work starts back up the next week. I do not disagree. Leisure is different, is done as an act of and solely by virtue of being human. The purpose of leisure is feeding the soul. The one who does not engage in feeding their soul is one depriving themselves of the basic function of being human. There is no reason leisure cannot be a part of your rest from work, but rest and leisure are not interchangeable terms.
In Vienna, I learned the reason the city has so many parks – about fifty percent of the city – is because the politicians realized people needed not only time, but a place to relax from work – and away from their home. Therefore, parks and green space have been set aside for relaxing, making Vienna the greenest city in the world. (They also have more dog parks than anywhere else, but that’s a different discussion.)
So, what did my week of rest entail? Finishing two books. Writing an essay draft with a pen on a piece of paper held in place by a clipboard older than I am. Mid-mornings spent at the dining room table instead of my desk. Venturing outside in the middle of a hazy day because the light was perfect for capturing photos of some new blooms I noticed in the yard. Making progress in my history books on Germany and Budapest.
I spent a week reading because I wasn’t entirely sure I could. Spending a week quietly resting sounds great, until you get there and suddenly have a dozen “better” ideas. I spent the week reading what I wanted to; what was interesting at the moment, whatever was sparked by a thought from another book or essay. I read impulsively and without regard to making it fit into a larger scheme. I made my to-do lists the number of hours I wanted to spend in a book. I gathered my copies of Didion, Emerson, Thoreau, and Tozer, the aforementioned history tomes, and decided to read with abandon and for enjoyment. I spent a week aiming for simplicity, and found that when you slow down, the world still slows down with you.
Image credit: César Couto on Unsplash
