PLGRM

I’ve blogged about Sabbath before. I think about sabbath a lot. Especially as a Christian pastor, I think having a vibrant and well-formed understanding of sabbath is a key part of our faith.

I’ve often attended to the systemic aspects of promoting Sabbath. As the leader of a church, a lot of what I do in relation to leading a staff is concerning myself with the well-being of all the people in the building. Do they have what they need to be successful? What’s getting in their way? that sort of thing.

One thing I try to keep my eye on is burnout.

Anne Helen Peterson once wrote a viral post about burnout that she turned into a book. She’s revisited the topic this week, and wrote this:

In short: burnout is caused by 1) problems on the societal level (lack of social safety net, precarity, dealing with being a person in your particular body with your particular identity in the world); 2) problems at the level of the workplace (policies, norms, work culture, productivity expectations); but also 3) problems on the level of the individual (self-value derived exclusively through work, inability to adhere to guardrails against overwork set by yourself and others, obsession with micro-management).

Peterson said she’s often avoid the aspect of personal agency (#3 in the quote) in her writing because the language we’ve had around burnout has been mediocre, at best.

Within this paradigm, burnout is a personal problem with personal solutions. With bath bombs, most infamously, but also: just take a little vacation. Download a meditation app. Buy a face mask. Practice some “self-care.” All of them infuriating because 1) they put the impetus for change wholly on the individual (and, in most cases, consumerism in some form) and 2) they did so little to actually address or even begin to solve the problem.

Ask my staff: I’m maniacal about them taking their vacation and PTO. I border on shaming them if they answer emails during off hours or days off. But what I’ve been sensing (and Peterson is confirming) is that it’s more than just a time issue.

It’s also a sense of self issue.

After sharing a story of a friend who’s new child “cured” her burnout, she arrived at this conclusion:

But I also understood what she was saying: the only way to stop working the way that she worked was to have something that effectively forced her to live her life differently. For some people, that’s getting sick, or becoming disabled — which can hold a very different valance. For her, that thing was kids.

At the time, I remember thinking to myself: since I’m not having kids, what will cure me? I couldn’t even conceive of having something in my life with as much gravity as my work. But gradually, one month at a time, I began to develop something, several things, that began to take up space in my mind and my day.

We have to develop other things to take up space in our brains.

This is a revelation.

Folk ask how I like my job (which I’ve been in for jsut about 3 years now) and I tell them I never thought I could have this much fun working. And it’s true. Every time I say it. ButI’d be lying if I said that I eat, sleep, and breathe church work. I don’t.

Most of the time, I’m actually thinking about photography. Or the book I’m writing. Or camping.

No kidding. I day dream and night dream about these things. They take up space in my brain ALL THE TIME.

And, looking back, when I’ve felt something that resembled burnout, it was during periods when all I had time for was the work I had to accomplish.

So, yes, seriously: Take the vacation. Don’t work on your days off. Absolutely.

BUT: Get a hobby. Or three.

Whatever it is, it takes time for an action to become a practice. After all, it took decades to hone my attitude (I’ll say it: addiction) to work. So it makes sense that it’s taken real time for me to figure out how best to diffuse it. A better or richer or more enlightened person might be able to dismantle it entirely, but right now, I’m settling for diffusion. And I realize, at least for myself, that to truly turn away from work I had to have something to turn towards.

I am doing less. I am lowering the bar. I am loosening my schedule. But I also have a fuller life, with so many places to direct my attention and time. It’s both less busy (with work) and more busy (with other life) than ever before.