My Year of Shmita: January Recap

I’m still not sure how to best track/recap my real-time progression through a “Year of Shmita”; for this month at least, I’m simply going to write down a smorgasbord of ideas without too much consideration of long-range formatting or deep thinking.

For any new readers here is a post I wrote about announcing my Year of Shmita, and another post about one of the ways I put this intention into action by stepping down from one of my working roles.

MONTHLY NOTES

Here are all the “notes” I took in the first month on a page I dedicated to this topic in my planner. I could type them all out and discuss them individually…or I could share a picture and let you read at your leisure (or feel free to skip if that better suits your mood today).

BOOKS I READ THAT RELATE TO SABBATH (PLUS ONE PODCAST EP)

• The Bible. The concept of Shmita as detailed in the Bible was the original impetus for my Year of Rest (in particular Exodus 23: 10-12).
• The Sabbath: Its Meaning for Modern Man by Abraham Joshua Heschel (4/5 stars). Perhaps the most famous book on the Sabbath, written by a famous Jewish rabbi. A deep introspection on the concept of Sabbath: what it means, why we relate to it, and how God designed this holy time to impress eternity on our hearts.
• Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times by Katherine May (3/5 stars). This was a re-read for me; aside from a few interesting/comforting vignettes, this book is just not my thing. I tried – twice!
• The Art of Stillness: Adventures in Going Nowhere by Pico Iyer (3.75/5). A secular take on Sabbath and stillness. A quick – albeit forgettable – read.
• The Ruthless Elimination of Hurry: How to Stay Emotionally Healthy and Spiritually Alive in the Chaos of the Modern World by John Mark Comer (5/5). A re-read for me and while I don’t love the writing style, this book is a big reason why I’m pursuing a Year of Shmita. Steeped in faith, Comer relies heavily on Biblical principles to promote rest. I see this book being hit-and-miss depending on the audience as it’s a very faith-centric approach to eliminating hurry, promoting the concept of Biblical Sabbath with practical suggestions on how to bring more rest and purpose into our days.
• Good Enough: 40ish Devotionals for a Life of Imperfection by Kate Bowler and Jessica Richie (4/5). I was…surprised. This book really WAS a devotional. There were much deeper faith themes here than I expected and more than in Bowler’s previous books. Some of the insights were profound, though I found the structure to be a bit repetitive (there was a “Beatitude Prayer” and some practical lessons associated with every devotion). I think this book would be best appreciated by doing one reading a day and then letting the message from that lesson percolate instead of reading them in a matter of consecutive days like I did. A gentle, reassuring devotional to bring one closer to God and more settled and at peace with imperfections and struggles.
• Burnout: The Secret to Unlocking the Stress Cycle by Emily Nagoski and Amelia Nagoski (3.5/5). I found this a bit of a slog. A lot of patriarchy-bashing in a relentless way that just felt old and tired by the end of the book. Not a lot of great takeaways for me, BUT several specific chapters really resonated with me and I think if someone picked this up and didn’t love it, skipping around to a few chapters or topics of interest would be useful as there is some great stuff.
• Remember Love: Words for Tender Times by Cleo Wade (5/5). I loved this book of poetry and reflections. LOVED. IT. AND…Heart Talk: Poetic Wisdom for a Better Life by Cleo Wade (3.5/5). It felt fluffy and repetitive. I suppose at a certain season or time this would have struck a better note for me. Not memorable and it won’t ever make a re-read list for me.

*See the bottom of this post for lots of quotes from the books mentioned above!*

Podcast: The Ezra Klein Show episode on Sabbath and the Art of Rest. I listened to it twice.

SABBATH CHANGES

I didn’t alter that much in my day-to-day life. I still worked part-time from home and was, in essence, also a full-time SAHM mom. I cooked lots. Solo parented. I ate and exercised and blogged and saw friends and did house projects. But I did make some subtle tweaks that made this January feel very different from last January and, thankfully, more restful.

• I started napping more. I’ve found a new method of napping that seems to work well. I struggled with napping for too long and waking groggy so now when I lie down I set my Apple Watch timer to 15 minutes. The haptic wakes me up if I’ve dozed off. Then I set the timer for 10 minutes. Again, the haptic is enough to wake me if I doze. Then I take my eye mask off and set the timer to 5 min. Sometimes I let myself keep dozing for a while, but always coming alert enough to set another 5-minute timer. Napping this way (my take on micronaps) doesn’t seem to impact my night’s sleep. I’d estimate I napped 8-10 times in January.

• I removed the Mail app, Feedly, and WordPress from my phone. These were the biggest time sucks for me.
• I stopped reading the news on my phone and moved Safari to the second screen.
• I removed the Screen Time widget from my phone. This was starting to be too overbearing for me (and I had a hard time not being irked by “good” screen time; for example, A had a lovely FaceTime call with her bestie and that made my screen time skyrocket). So I removed it and no longer specifically monitor screen time.
• I tried loose time blocking for structuring my days.
• I largely went digital-free every Saturday at 4 pm to Sunday at 4 pm. Not exclusively – I had to make a few phone calls and need to screen texts, especially when John is away and I’m managing all logistics solo. Sabbath is an art, not a science and there is no one right way.

And that’s a wrap on January 2024 – the first month in my Year of Shmita.

I wrote down a lot of quotes from the books I mentioned above; this isn’t an exhaustive list of those quotes – nor does it necessarily represent my absolute favourites – but it’s a good sampling of the type of inspiration I was drawn to…

Remember Love + Heart Talk – Cleo Wade

• My rest does not need a reason.
• Just because something is in our capacity does not make it our responsibility.
• Distance is not always avoidance. Distance is sometimes the boundary we need in order to heal from the hurt caused by others, and avoid reinjury.
• Quitting is not always failure. It can sometimes be the only way to give ourselves the care we need to make room for something new.
• It does not benefit anyone when we live our lives running on fumes. Love is an action, a thing in motion. Therefore it requires fuel. Only a full tank can go the distance.
• Create your own finish lines. Let there be as many as you want, and let there be many.

Good Enough – Kate Bowler

• How we spend our time defines who we are. There is no magical future. Today is our future.
• You are not ruined or broken or a failure. You are simply in pain.
• A seed reaches its potential only when it is buried.

The Sabbath – Abraham Heschel

• The meaning of Sabbath is to celebrate time rather than space.
• Six days a week we wrestle with the world, wringing profit from the earth; on the Sabbath we especially care for the seed of eternity planted in the soul.
• The Sabbath…[is] an opportunity to mend our tattered lives; to collect rather than to dissipate time. Labour without dignity is the cause of misery; rest without Spirit is the source of depravity.
• All week we may ponder and worry whether we are rich or poor, whether we succeed or fail in our occupations; whether we accomplish or fall short of reaching our goals. But who could feel distressed when gazing at spectral glimpses of eternity, except to feel startled at the vanity of being so distressed?
• The Sabbath is me’en ‘olam ha-ba, which means: somewhat like eternity or the world to come. All our life should be a pilgrimage to the seventh day; the thought and appreciation of what this day may bring to us should be ever present in our minds.
• The longing for the Sabbath all days of the week is a form of longing for the eternal Sabbath.
• Time is man’s greatest challenge…beyond our reach, beyond our power. It belongs exclusively to God.
• Every one of us occupies a portion of space. The portion of space which my body occupies is taken up by myself in exclusion. Yet, no one possesses time. We share time, we own space. Through my ownership of space, I am a rival of all other beings; through my living in time, I am a contemporary of all other beings. To men alone time is elusive; to men with God time is eternity in disguise.

Wintering – Katherine May

• Plants and animals don’t fight the winter; they don’t pretend it’s not happening and attempt to carry on living the same lives that they lived in the summer. They prepare. They adapt. They perform extraordinary acts of metamorphosis to get them through. Winter is a time of withdrawing from the world, maximizing scant resources, carrying out acts of brutal efficiency and vanishing from sight.

The Art of Stillness – Pico Iyer

• If your car is broken, you don’t try to find ways to repaint its chassis; most of our problems – and therefore our solutions, our peace of mind – lie within.
• Heaven is a place where you think of nowhere else.
• The one thing technology doesn’t provide us with is a sense of how to make the best use of technology.
• …it’s the rest in a piece of music that gives it resonance and shape.

The Ruthless Elimination of Hurry – John Mark Comer

• Form a clear intention to live without hurry.
• We need to wait for our souls to catch up with our bodies.
• Hurry is a form of violence on the soul.
• Love takes time; hurry doesn’t have it.
• Our hearts will follow our treasures: time, money, and attention.
• In the end your life is no more than the sum of what you gave your attention to.
• The solution to an overbusy life is not more time. It’s to slow down and simplify our lives around what really matters.
• In some seasons we just have very little extra time to give away.
• We find God’s will for our lives in our limitations.
• Our schedule needs to align with our values.
• It is not as though we do not love God – we love God deeply. We just do not know how to sit with God anymore.
• Shabbat – to stop/to delight; stopping and enjoying.
• Sabbath is a way of saying: “Enough.”
• Simplicity is an inward reality that can be seen in an outward lifestyle of choosing to leverage time, money, talents, and possessions toward what matters most.