Day of Rest

A person covered by a blanket on a sofa with feet sticking out.

When is the last time you took a true day of rest?  I mean, for real.  No housework, no checking work emails, no work?

Me? I’m always doing something productive.   I was looking over my Bullet Journal in the past few weeks, I’ve realized something.  I never really take a day off.  Even on weekends, when hey, relaxing is important, I find lists of things to do to prepare for the next week.

I bet a lot of you are like that.

I bet many people use being busy as a way to cope with rough times, too.

Are you worried about maybe driving yourself crazy with that?

Now, if you’re Jewish and observant, you probably read the first line of this post and said, “Well, Shabbos, same as always.”

Many religious traditions have a concept of a Sabbath.  The more religious you are, chances are the stricter you are about protecting that day, too.

Recently, The Man of the House and I talked about it and decided that we were going to do a secular Day of Rest.  However, since it’s a personal preference to prep for the next day the night before, we took a cue from the Jewish tradition of the Sabbath and had it begin the night before for us as well.  Our cue that the Day of Leisure was to begin would be after we fed our cats their evening gooshy food.  We do that around five in the evening.  Sun to sun doesn’t work for us.  We have too much variation in the year to find that desirable.

During our Day of Leisure, we would do No Work At All.  Not cooking. I made a breakfast casserole and had other pre-made food on hand.  Not washing up. We could put dishes in the dishwasher. Not anything that we’d consider “professional” or count towards professional time.  I even waited until after five to start even thinking about this blog post.

We could engage in hobbies. Knitting is fine because that’s not the only way we get socks.  If it were work, that would change. We can read books, visit with friends and family, (well, online.  Covid-19 is still a problem), watch movies, take a walk, or anything strictly fun.

Saturday was busy. We did our weekly cleaning, prepping some food, doing some other things I used to do Sunday afternoon to prep for the week, and making a nice dinner for when the Day of Leisure was to begin.  I even changed into a nice lounging outfit for the occasion.

The Saturday night wasn’t that unusual.  We often have a nice meal and watch something.  However, I went to be with the full intention of Not Working all day.

Deliberately.

Sunday, was pretty amazing.  I didn’t cook a darn thing other than to put a casserole in the oven.  I cleaned nothing.   I didn’t plan a thing for the coming week.  I even had a book ready to read and spent the whole darn day diving into the book. 

To be frank, my personal indulgence of sitting down and reading a book cover to cover had become an infrequent thing in recent decades.  I think days of rest are ideal for that.

I didn’t even play on social media really.  I wasn’t forbidding myself to do so, but *shrugs* I considered myself off the hook for the Outside World.

My husband spent some time drawing. 

We talked about it afterwards and decided, yeah, a full Day of Leisure every week was going to be a thing for us for a bit. 

So, what do you think?  Do you observe a Sabbath, or do you think this is a good idea?   Lemme know in the comments!

2 Replies to “Day of Rest”

  1. I love this! It’s kind of like when you go on vacation, and you look all around your hotel room and see nothing that’s a to-do. It’s so restful! So glad you had some time to dive deep into a book.

    We try to observe a Sunday day of rest but we’re not terribly strict about it. Sometimes some piece of a task from the day before gets carried over. But our rest doesn’t preclude cooking or cleaning up from cooking. It often does include literal rest. The Huz likes his Holy Nap. A lot. 😃 And when he’s napping I’m often doing something enjoyable. Or just hanging out online or visiting with someone. So, yeah, it’s good! Thanks for evangelizing the idea!

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