On Ease, pt. 2

What a challenging year to seek out ease.

Even though 2022 doesn’t feel like a new year, I am doing my best to treat it as such. I kicked off Ease 2022 by bringing back my technology sabbaths, a practice where I turn off my phone for 24 hours over the weekend. I find it restful to pause the endless barrage of messages, emails, and notifications that seek my constant attention, and just do something else for a day or so. What better way to kick off a year around ease?

As I meditated on my year themed around ease, I realized that this pursuit will require me to shift how I categorize my time. Half the time, I can’t tell if I am still thrown off by the pandemic, or if I have really become comfortable doing less with my time. Most days, it feels like all I can do to accomplish the bare minimum: ensuring I am clean, dressed, fed, and showing up with some presence at work. I need less time on self-improvement and more time on mindful physical motion in my body. I need less time on paid work and more time in guilt-free leisure. I have so many creative dreams that are currently resting fallow as I prepare to enter the spring.

One of my hopes for this year of ease was to joyfully (re)discover my sense of fun. What do I even do for fun? How do I like to decompress? What things do I like to do simply for their own sake? Not to get better at, not for capitalism, but what brings me joy in the day-to-day of things? How much time am I spending just being, where I am quite literally not doing anything? I feel like a mad scientist in a lab, concocting potions to see which ones can heal my relationship to fun. It’s hard to carve out room for hobbies in a culture so decimated by workaholism. The pandemic also shut down many venues for art, thereby closing off a number of my preferred leisure time activities. For now, adding a few card games I used to love to my iPad and deeply listening to music has helped open new paths toward play.

As the spring approaches, I anticipate ease to mean reconnecting deeply with the outdoors. It is scientifically impossible for me to feel stressed while staring up at the wide, blue sky: my problems, which feel so big indoors, shrink to their appropriate size under heaven. I love watching clouds, gazing up at old trees from lying on a blanket, staring up at the stars (especially watching them first emerge from the twilight), counting the lightning bugs in the grass. Outdoors becoming more accessible this spring/summer will definitely help me “wander lonely as a cloud,” to quote Wordsworth’s poem about the daffodils.

Ease also means re-evaluating more than just my own time usage; it requires shifting my conception of what time is for. Long years of overachieving academically have habituated me to seeing all time as latent work time. It is stressful to be in my home and feel the tug of “I could be working.” My body has a visceral, tense reaction to that statement. And yet, in this self-appointed season of Ease 2022, I am working on consciously reshaping what that acknowledgment means to myself. Yes, I could be working. That is true. And here I am, choosing leisure instead. Now what?

Now what indeed. In The Artist’s Way, Julia Cameron challenges readers to take a week-long break from reading around the 4th week mark. What will you do with your time instead? she wonders, and as I explore where this year of ease takes me, I find myself wondering much the same. What will I do with unstructured time? Do I have the courage to leave (some) time unstructured? Do I trust myself that much? Most importantly of all, can I accept myself for who I am when I am not doing something all the goddamn time? Who am I when I am at rest?

All these questions percolating up will have plenty of time to sit with me as I stare out of the window.

PS: For more on that, check out this School of Life essay by Alain de Botton, '“The Importance of Staring Out the Window.” (snippet below!) As always, if you like what you read, consider supporting the work on Buy Me a Coffee.

“Window daydreaming is a strategic rebellion against the excessive demands of immediate (but ultimately insignificant) pressures – in favour of the diffuse, but very serious, search for the wisdom of the unexplored deep self.”