Learning to Replenish

“Who are we when there’s nothing to keep us busy?”

Facebook tells me I posted this quote a little over three years ago and attributed it to Henri Nouwen. I can’t find now where he said this insightful thing, so maybe he didn’t. Nevertheless, it is a question that has made me pause.

Because my school year has ended. (Do I hear an “Amen”?) I’m back on duty the first week of August, but that gives me two months. I’ve got three weeks of camps I’m teaching in July, plus VBS. And I leave this weekend to visit my eldest in Missouri for several days. But for most of June, my time is uncommitted. Of course, I have a list . . . I ALWAYS have a list. But none of the items thereon are terribly urgent.

I have a month ahead of me with not much to keep me busy. And that’s downright weird.

I have always been busy. Always. I honestly don’t remember a significant period of time since middle school that I didn’t feel stressed out. There has always been something I was in the middle of doing . . . something I had to get done before tomorrow . . . something that I needed to get done this week . . . something that I felt like I should do but never seemed to be able to make happen . . . always something. Even when I “rested”, I never really felt like I was resting because there was still the burden sitting on my shoulders of the endless unfinished tasks.

As a mother of littles, I never felt like I got a break – especially because I homeschooled, so I was never apart from them. I was mothering from the time they got up until they went to bed, and the rest of the time, I was getting everything else done that I couldn’t do with them awake . . . or crashing and doing something to try to help my body and brain recover for the next day (often sleeping, but I wasn’t doing that very effectively back then).

Three years ago, when I posted the Nouwen quote, we were in the middle of a pandemic. I was a teacher, and at that point in the lockdown, I was busy all the time. Those first couple of weeks I did nothing but work and eat when I was not sleeping in bed. By Friday of the second week of doing online school, our academic dean explicitly forbade all of us from working on Sunday. “You HAVE to rest. You cannot keep up this pace.” The stress let up a little bit after Alyssa’s proclamation, but not a lot.

True rest, it seems, is a learned skill. And I’m not good at it.

But in recent months, I’ve been learning the value of intentionally putting the to-dos aside and doing whatever I feel like doing that moment. Read a book. Play piano. Watch a show. Take a walk. I’ve been making myself stop working in the evenings – and on Sundays. I do what I want to do.

Is it weird that I don’t always know what I want to do?

I actually wrote here about that Nouwen quote a couple years ago, commenting that now that I was not wife-ing and mothering 24/7, “me and my wants are still a bit of a mystery.”

Is it weird that they still are?

But that ever-present burden of endless unfinished tasks . . . it has certainly lightened. Enough so to make me more aware of its weight and its damage. I have definitely gotten to know myself in the last couple years. And I’m happy to say, I’ve grown a bit fond of this odd chick in my house. I at least care enough about her to make her figure out how to replenish herself when she needs it.