The Rats are Getting Tired

This past Long weekend Peachland transformed itself into a zoo.  I have often walked Beach Avenue wondering if there was anyone else in the community, but not this past Sunday.  You couldn’t find parking on the highway let alone the street due to the car show that was taking place.  What an enjoyable, busy day for the jungle of people who took in the sights and sounds.

I spent my Victoria day away from the crowds, building a rock wall while having a war of words with my back, insisting that it wasn’t as old as it was telling me.  Talk about time off: I go from my pastoral desk job to hard labour and call it a holiday.  I can’t wait to get back to work so I can rest my sore muscles.

Canadians like to say that we live for long weekends.  Those three special days in a row taking place oh so rarely spell freedom from schedules, work, and our regular routines.  This is cause for celebration –sometimes too much celebration apparently, as some provincial and federal parks hinted by banning liquour in their parks over the May long weekend.

The dictionary defines leisure as freedom from the demands of work and duty.  It’s a surprise then when we feel so tired after our weekend.  If our leisure time is freedom, why do we seem to need a holiday from our holidays? 

We like to use the word “busy” a lot, though I wonder how busy we actually are.  I mean, if we say we’re busy because of our demands of work and duty, that’s fine.  (Although according to statistics we’re not as “busy” as we think we are at the work place, with Facebook, personal e-mails, and extended coffee times and lunches being the primary culprits).  But when we start throwing out the word busy to describe many of our other activities—our hobbies, our holidays, our down-times—it seems like becomes a vocal cue to speed up the pace of our personal lives.  Busy shouldn’t bleed into our leisure.  Not this much.

Of course it’s appropriate to say we’re busy when our schedule is full with other things outside of work and duty.  By definition, busy is to be actively and attentively engaged in work or a pastime.  In fact, most of our schedules are more than busy –they’re chaotic!  Our whole society is absorbed with filling iphones and Blackberries with appointments of play-dates and birthday parties and sleep-overs.  We book our evenings and weekends long in advance, making sure our kids make it to their soccer practices held at different fields, it would appear, around the globe.  We race to the campground, we run to the cabin, we high-tail it to the Caribbean, or Disneyland, or Alaska.  Time’s a wasting; life is ticking by.  Let’s get it done.

But busyness, even with pastimes, is not leisure.   As society continues to practice its collective Attention Deficit Disorder, opportunities to rest are in steep decline.  We stay up later and sleep less.  We eat often while standing or walking, and often alone.  We have little time to reflect, to really chew on an idea, to be really creative.  No wonder sleep, anxiety and depression disorders are on the rise!  There is no margin, no gap between all of the different components of our lives.  It’s a rat race out there, and the rats are getting tired.

Two particular aspects of Jesus’ ministry have always intrigued me.  The first one was that he was only 33 years old when he finished his mission.  That’s pretty young, or pretty old depending on whether you’ve reached that age or not.  I often remark to people when I find out they’ve turned 33 that hey, they’re the same age Jesus was when he died.  This is sometimes more rattling to people than what I intend, especially those with a messiah complex who now realize that they better get busy with their mandate to save the world.  Most scholars agree that Jesus was probably only “on the job” for 3 years; he packed an awful lot of business into those three years.

Which leads to the second aspect of intrigue.  Jesus spent a lot of time, by himself, alone.  He would go from being at the center of the crowds to a mountaintop alone, to pray and recharge.  He would go from spending time with his disciples to being by himself, to contemplate and rest.  Imagine that: the Son of God needing down time.  Apparently holy leisure had to exist in order to make holy work more productive and purposeful. 

When I think about these traits of Jesus in the midst of a hectic life, it makes me want to dust off my old WWJD? bracelet and answer the question directly: it’s high time I schedule in leisure—real leisure, the kind that gets us to “let go and let God”—and reclaim the rest necessary for every human soul.