Sabbath Report #7

From the sickbed...

Photo by Nastya Dobryvecher on Unsplash

This final sabbath report will be a short one, as I’m penning it from the midst of Covid, which hit me full-force last Monday with its triple punch of congestion, exhaustion, and brain fog. Naturally, these symptoms make it difficult to draft anything, but they do also succeed in invoking a parallel sense of sabbath—the sabbath of sickness, when your body exempts you from all productive endeavors for a yet-to-be-determined amount of time. As productive endeavors have always served as my main justification for my existence upon this earth, sickness hits double for me. Not only do I find myself physically unwell, but I also find myself face-to-face with that haunting sense of worthlessness I usually avoid by keeping myself too busy to confront it.

It strikes me now, as I take these days off from writing, from errands, from appointments, from volunteer shifts with my child’s theater program, that I could also take this as an opportunity to learn whatever lessons were on offer. And so I resolved to keep an eye out throughout my week of sick, and this, more or less, is what I have learned…

My individual actions are not as necessary as I think.

I missed my daughter’s orchestra concert, and the world went on spinning. I handed off dinners, and Scott served brats and mac n’ cheese, (which the kids tragically preferred to my over-vegetabled, under-carbed offerings), and a dear friend dropped off three dinners’ worth of food. I fell into sleep as though falling from a high precipice, and when I woke, the kids had caught the bus to school with all of their necessaries. I missed days of writing, and my projects, when at last I began to approach them, kept their backs turned for only a few minutes before shrugging and beginning again to talk to me.

The deep waters of sleep (Photo by Imleedh Ali on Unsplash)

In other words, I spent almost an entire week sleeping and listening to audiobooks and taking salt baths and bingeing the Great British Baking Show, and yet everything just kept clipping along without my intention or intervention.

Sabbaths, both sickness-induced and otherwise, offer a similar glimpse into a truth that our constant hustle keeps hidden: that none of us are independently important because none of us are independent at all. And it is very difficult to realize this unless we are required — either by sickness or by some spiritual practice — to fall back into those connections which sustain us and which, when we collapse, continue trundling us onward without a trifle of effort on our part.

These considerations, I sense, are leading me toward my next Small Experiment. What if, instead of trying to convince myself of my own consequence (a habit I engage in more often than I’d like to admit), I aimed instead to convince myself of the opposite? If, instead of trying to evidence my own importance to myself, I practiced surrendering my individual lack of importance to the larger world of which I am an inseparable part? What freedom might I find if I stopped trying to make myself extraordinary? What wisdom might I realize, given that wealth of perspective?

Ashes to ashes, baby.

Now that my Digital Sabbath series has ended, I’m going to take the rest of Lent off from writing newsletters, though I will continue to take Sundays off of screens. I’ll be returning post-Easter with a new experiment, one which I’m still brewing, but which is sure to include an exploration of my Mennonite faith alongside the renewed development of our little farm, which is already awakening, once again, with the spring.

Until April, rest to you, friends, and reflection and renewal,

Michelle

And seeds! All the seeds!