This week I finished the 100 articles in 100 days. The last article I wrote was on Wednesday. I wanted to have some rest before starting the next 100-day challenge from the 1st of August.
By rest, I meant not to write an article for a few days. By evening, on Thursday, I started feeling miserable. What was the point of doing all that work when I was going to break the habit at the first opportunity?
So I wrote an article and published it.
I am reading a brilliant book by Abraham Joshua Heschel, The Sabbath. Published in 1951, the book explores the Jewish faith’s unique relationship with time and rest.
“Remember the Sabbath day, to keep it holy. Six days you shall labor, and do all your work, but the seventh day is a Sabbath to the Lord your God. On it you shall not do any work, you, or your son, or your daughter, your male servant, or your female servant, or your livestock, or the sojourner who is within your gates. For in six days the Lord made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that is in them, and rested on the seventh day. Therefore the Lord blessed the Sabbath day and made it holy.” - Exodus, 20:8-11
The scripture commands to embed rest in a workweek but it declares the rest something holy.
I am neither a Jew nor a religious person, but even as a productivity fanatic, I am beginning to see the importance of embedding rest in our schedule.
“We expend time to gain space,” the rabbi Heschel writes, “but things go wrong when space becomes our only concern. We become occupied with objects, with things, or nouns.” The Hebrew Bible is “more concerned with time than with space.”
Judaism is a religion of time aiming at the sanctification of time. Unlike the space-minded man to whom time is unvaried, iterative, homogeneous, to whom all hours are alike, qualitiless, empty shells, the Bible senses the diversified character of time. There are no two hours alike. Every hour is unique and the only one given at the moment, exclusive and endlessly precious.
The meaning of the Sabbath is “to celebrate time rather than space” and to get out from “under the tyranny of things of space.”
The Sabbath is a time in which you not only abstain from work; you don’t even think about work.
Artist coach Beth Pickens’ uses the concept of Shabbat with all the artists asking them to choose a twenty-four-hour period every week from which they abstain from any work that could lead to making money, including their art.
Is it a bit hard to swallow?
A creative person suffers when they’re away from their creative practice.
Surely we should use all the spare time we get to make art.
But Picken’s students find that day off from their work restores their spirit and energy.
I have decided to have good, old-fashioned weekends when I will not do any writing. When I was working on a job, the weekends were distinct. The days you don’t go to work. Now, working from home, there is no demarcation. I find myself working at all sorts of weird hours.
We have invented the weekend, but the dark cloud of old taboos still hangs over the holiday, and the combination of the secular with the holy leaves us uneasy. This tension only compounds the guilt that many of us continue to feel about not working, and leads to the nagging feeling that our free time should be used for some purpose higher than having fun. We want leisure, but we are afraid of it, too.
- Witold Rybczynski, Waiting for the Weekend.
Fridays are the days when I send my newsletter. It is also the day when I send out a travel article. Once both these tasks are done, that will mark the end of my work week.
But soon I was hit by another panic, if not write then what will I do?
I spent the afternoon jotting down the things that I can do on weekends. Things I love to do but haven’t done for a while.
Here are the links to this week’s articles on Medium.
Mission Accomplished — 100 Articles in 100 Days
Don’t Make Earning Plans, Make Learning Plans
Work-Life Balance — Have We Got It All Wrong
One True Fan, Was All I Needed
My Ultimate List of Writing Advice
Istanbul — A City of 3,200 Mosques
Enjoy!
That’s it from me this week.
Take care.
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I know how it is when you have formed a habit .. it is hard to break . But diversity is a part of the game , take a break to do something different and see different perspectives by choosing variety