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| Passing Time by Hiking Artist.com |
Now that I am semi-retired, I have the time to analyze the nature of work, and am in the process of deciding whether it is actually necessary in my life. While I do not imagine myself digging a small dirt room into the side of a mountain and living completely off the grid, I can see myself living off of very little money and therefore needing to generate very little money to survive. This raises all my fears around security and safety, however, as I have been taught to see money as a safety net. While money can provide very real safety in certain situations, it is certainly not always what is needed to help fix a situation, and really cannot be counted on when we live in such tumultuous economic times. What if time is my currency of choice? Time feels significantly more valuable to me than money, and choosing what to do with my time gives me a great sense of power over my own life. It's also impossible to hoard extra time, which has some advantages over money as a currency. I have to spend it wisely as I go, getting the most value out of each irreplaceable hour. Of course, for a perfectionist like me, this idea can easily have me spinning down a rabbit hole with the desire to spend each moment in the "perfect" way. But then if relaxing is the perfect way to spend this moment, how can I do so when I am feeling anxious about how I spend the hour. This is definitely another area for growth!
I have been in a deep process around all of these concepts over the past 10 years, including living off-grid and super low income for several years, and later having 2 children and having to re-orient pretty significantly to increased expenses and financial responsibilities. And, time is still my currency of choice. These days I'm thinking a lot about work in terms of Sustainability, as part of my process of developing The Sustainability Cycle: Rest, Play, Output. Repeat.
ReplyDeleteAll WORK is the TOTALITY of what it takes to create the output. WORK includes the rest and play that came with the output. When we are operating SUSTAINABLY we are in an ongoing, ever-unfurling cycle of Rest - Play - Output. Over and over and over. And yet in the mathematics of Capitalism, 2/3 of our work is not acknowledged or compensated: the rest and play that were REQUIRED for us to give output to our jobs. How do we reconcile our need for sustainability with the impossibility of it within our current global contexts?
For the content I generate, my goal is to first rest, then resource through pleasure and play, then create content. Sometimes these are brief cycles when the capacity I am generating is for lower level, task-oriented productivity with little emotional charge. Medium-length Sustainability Cycles help me through blocks and stuck places. And sometimes the cycle is long - periods of deep rest, deep play, and deep creation. This is where I grow the most, and where I often find myself in deep scary places of shadow work. When I'm there I forget that I’ll ever feel a different way again. I feel trapped underground. And then it shifts and I am relieved and I can relax into the experience more because I remember once again that the only constant is change.
On this journey of centering energetic sustainability, my nervous system is more resilient for functioning in this dysregulating world. And so I turn over and over and over toward Time as my most precious resource. This helps me ground in Slowness and Gentleness, aka the Land of Sustainability.