Hi Friends-
I left home a few weeks ago for my first real, out-of-house adventure since lockdown started back in March. (Nothing crazy, just a camping trip.) And I came back to realize that this supposedly queued-up newsletter never sent. Whoops!
So let's get caught up...
If you missed it, I recently released a new Hurry Slowly episode that's a meditation on what our energetic reserves look like 6 months into this pandemic and 3+ months into ongoing uprisings and civil unrest.
Short story: Most of us are drained; the "surge capacity" we called on early in the crisis is now depleted. And there was already a trend toward burnout in the US before 2020 ratcheted our stress through the roof.
From my perspective, that means it's high time to consider adopting a new attitude toward what it means to be "productive." One where rest and tenderness are as much of a priority as speed and efficiency.
Listen to: "A Call for Rest & Tenderness"
And speaking of prioritizing rest and tenderness, I've just re-opened my course RESET, a cosmic tune-up for your workday, after a 9-month hiatus. It's all about how we can shift from a speed-obsessed way of working to a more sustainable, heart-centered way of working.
Learn more about RESET & "heart-centered productivity"
| | LINK ABOUT IT
The year of grief, the year of rest. A beautiful piece from Tricia Hersey, founder of the Nap Ministry, on taking a 3-week sabbath in the midst of the pandemic and the uprisings: "It has always been time for justice. It has always been time to rest. Rest is a form of resistance because it disrupts and pushes back against capitalism and white supremacy. We cling to this truth like a lifeboat in a raging sea. We cling to the power of collective care and collective rest opening the dreamscape that will allow us to invent and imagine a New World rooted in rest."
What does boredom do to us? An entertaining longread on the science of boredom and what it can (and can't) do for us: "There is also something restorative and humane about asserting the right to complain of boredom in a harsh time—an unbridled yearning after the ordinary vividness and variety of life. In a new book called Square Haunting: Five Writers in London Between the Wars, Francesca Wade quotes the historian Eileen Power, in 1939. 'Oh! That this blasted war were over,' she wrote. 'The boredom of it is incredible. My mind has been blown out like a candle. I am nothing but an embodied grumble, like everyone else.' Sometimes it's the grumbling that keeps us alive."
Vocational awe. A great essay from Anne Helen Petersen about a term I didn't know — "vocational awe" — and the incredibly high demands we place on certain types of essential workers: "Before the pandemic, I was thinking a lot about how jobs with vocational awe — from librarians to teachers, from pastors to zookeepers — ironically expose the workers with those jobs to exploitation. Complain about pay? You don't love the job enough. Attempt to unionize to advocate for a better safety net? You don't love the job enough. Complain about systemic sexism, racism, or other exclusionary practices at your institution? You don't love the job enough."
Eight secrets to a (fairly) fulfilled life. The final Guardian column from podcast friend and self-help skeptic Oliver Burkeman: "The future will never provide the reassurance you seek from it. As the ancient Greek and Roman Stoics understood, much of our suffering arises from attempting to control what is not in our control. And the main thing we try but fail to control – the seasoned worriers among us, anyway – is the future. We want to know, from our vantage point in the present, that things will be OK later on. But we never can. (This is why it's wrong to say we live in especially uncertain times. The future is always uncertain; it's just that we're currently very aware of it.)"
+ "There is no end to what a living world will demand of you."
+ The goal of life is meaning, not happiness.
+ The nature of work after the COVID crisis.
+ Elephants vs climate change.
| | SHOUT-OUTS:
The artwork is from: Marc Majewski, who is based in Berlin, Germany.
Link ideas from: Culture Study, Exponential View, and SwissMiss.
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Hi, I'm Jocelyn, the human behind this newsletter. I created the online course RESET, a cosmic tune-up for your workday, and I host Hurry Slowly — a podcast about how you can be more productive, creative, and resilient by slowing down. | | | | |
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