I have been thinking quite a bit of the Josef Piper piece you retweeted this week on acedia and magnanimity, and the tweet someone posted in relation to this that sloth is the “refusal to take responsibility for joy."
After years working at Fordham as a therapist and a grad student in Spirituality / Ethics, I quit to be a stay at home mom four years ago. I mourned my job for a long time, and recently I had been slipping into ennui and acedia. Rediscovering this “responsibility for joy” and magnanimity towards my vocation has been my experience during the pandemic.
Practically, the biggest thing that has changed is that I homeschool now - not distance learning, but independent homeschool. We have curated activities to the ones that truly matter. This allows our girls more time to play and more time for us to spend together as a family. We have become more intentional about relationships, now that we can’t relay on casual contact anymore. I would like this to continue.
We have also learned to take more notice of the vulnerability of others. This year the girls rode along with me when I delivered Thanksgiving baskets to people in the community, many of them elderly, who need assistance (yes, they social distanced and wore masks.) They did not do things like this in the community when they were in school all day and busy with too many activities in the evening. My children have also become more aware in general of those who are vulnerable; they see the them now, and they are getting a sense of interconnected responsibility towards them as members of society. I think that is probably one of most valuable things many of us have gotten out of this pandemic.
As we build back I want to do so carefully. While homeschooling doesn't work for everyone (and I am very aware of the struggle of working families that suffer from lack of childcare), I would love to see how education for my children can continue to work outside of the 9-3:30, 5 days a week model in a single building, and can instead become a more intentional experience of being integrated into family and community. I want to hold on to our additional family time. I want my children to continue to notice and develop sensitivity towards the vulnerability of others around us.
And from a spiritual perspective, I want to hold onto the sense of magnanimity towards our vocation and "responsibility for joy" that we have rediscovered.
Neither of my jobs allows for remote work just by the nature of the thing (cleaning floors in the wake of several busy bakers is not something you can do over Zoom, for example), but two things that have made this year much easier for me have been because of COVID.
At one of my jobs, part-time workers (which is almost all of us) get paid sick days if we have Covid-like symptoms. This means if we get sick, even if it's just the less deadly flu, we can stay home without worrying about our paychecks. Which means fewer sick people have been stuffing themselves with medicine and dragging themselves into work (and sharing germs with the rest of us), and so we've actually seen less sickness overall. Also, people have actually been washing their hands, people give each other personal space, we're not handling items from members of the public. . . and so, I've gone without catching an infectious disease (and I say this without exaggeration) longer than ever before in my life. If people could remember the benefits of just these two relatively simple things when the threat of death is no longer attached, the future could be noticeably better.
The flexibility of working from home has meant that I've been taking care of myself much better than I was before. Now that I'm just walking into the living room instead of riding the train to work, I'm getting more sleep and have more time in the morning to spend in prayer. I can eat dinner when I'm hungry instead of commuting home with a growling stomach, and even when they're quick, my dinners are healthier and more filling. I'm exercising more often because I don't have to fit a trip to the gym around my work schedule. I hope post-COVID there are companies willing to accommodate this kind of work-life balance--sometimes it seems like "work-life balance" at many companies just means "we won't force you to work after 6 pm and also there are some good restaurants in the area you could go to at lunch".
I've also been a better worker while working from home, without spending extra time working. I write marketing copy, which means I spent most of my day staring at various Google docs. But while working from home, if I get stuck on an assignment, I can go unload the dishwasher or take a walk to get my brain moving again. I have the silence and space that creates better writing, which is so difficult to replicate in an office. I loved my office and miss it, but it's undeniable that offices are bad spaces to nurture good writing. My dream office would make space for people doing creative work to get up from the computer and do something else for a while, instead of monitoring whether or not we're sitting at our desks. (And writers would get big signs we could put up on our desks that said "IF IT'S NOT ON FIRE, ASK ME LATER".)
Lastly, the pandemic has exposed to me how much of my life in public was driven by FOMO, jealousy, and other people's expectations. I work(ed) downtown in a major city, so every workday was like being bombarded by tempting possibilities: I should get a new leather bag, I should buy a fancy sandwich in the food hall, I should take an international vacation like my coworkers, I should upgrade my phone... The things I actually wanted and needed were being buried under my attempts to resist these tugs at my desire, I was grumpy and restless, and I questioned a lot of my choices. Now it's all just...gone. No one is doing anything to be jealous of, and spending time with myself has made my actual desires and longings easier to identify. It turns out when I'm not exposed to this flurry of alluring objects, they lose their allure and my real hopes and dreams are more solid and wholesome, like "write something great" and "be a mom". I hope that when I'm back out in the world, I can hold onto this sense of my true self and not get sucked in again by everyone else's choices.
One of the great blessings of this pandemic is it tore away the blinders so many of us carried - about how 'compassionate' our status quo has been. Essential workers requiring food stamps to get by and lacking health insurance, people making more on unemployment than they did working full time, the unsustainability and inhumanity of the 80 hr weeks....
The question of 'how' to build back better is a fascinating one. How do we get the needs of workers met - or at least taken seriously - by their employers? How do we provide adequate health insurance? Adequate housing? Adequate social supports?
And who has already been doing this work ardently for decades?
Obviously I'm biased, but stronger labor unions, and more omnipresent unionization, would make a huge difference. It's the fastest way to legally create the pressure and the contracts to sustain these changes. And labor has been doing the hard work of advocacy for workers and families for generations.
As a grad student, having lectures for my classes automatically recorded has been invaluable. Now if I have to miss a lecture for any reason, I can watch the recording instead of trying to make sense of (often very badly written) lecture notes. There's also the typical benefit of having a bit more time to cook and keep my apartment cleaner using the time I would otherwise have spent commuting. Now that I have a home office set up fairly nicely, I anticipate that once we can return to the office, I will stay home on days when I don't have in-person classes or meetings.
Honestly, not a whole lot else has gotten better. Some folks in academia are very excited about remote conferences, and I can see how they are a great option for parents of young children, people with health conditions, etc., but I just find them so much less energizing and interesting. I really miss having in-person meetings--there's nothing online that can really compare to working on a whiteboard with someone else. I miss department social events and find the online ones pretty terrible.
I definitely enjoy the shift to more remote work. I'm a social worker working with individuals experiencing homelessness in central New Jersey and much of my work is done on the phone which I'm able to do from home. This does create an issue of being able to mentally separate from my work but I'm getting better at that and I do still enjoy going into the office a few days a week and meeting clients in the field. My husband manages a small independent hardware store so his work has not shifted online at all, but the new emphasis on shopping local has helped his business.
I definitely think that the pandemic has changed my priorities in a way that I appreciate. I've definitely lost the feeling of competition with my friends and other people I know who I feel are "ahead" of me or something, and FOMO has been replaced by a deepened appreciation for relationships and community. I mean, I'd still like to be able to go out to dinner, but I definitely appreciate this slower pace and I'm in no rush to be busy again (outside work. I'm plenty busy there).
working from home gives me much more time to write. I'm also spending a lot more time with my family. rather than being driven crazy, I feel like I've gotten so much closer to my sister, who works right across from me in our kitchen nook.
I had quit my job in January and was teaching a college course when COVID hit. The plan was for me to regroup and take a self-funded "sabbatical" as I determined next steps for my career. The next step ended up being homeschooling. So I went from a Research Scientist/Project Associate working part-time while my kindergartener and second grade twins were in school to a homeschooling mother. It has been mind-blowing. We hope that post-COVID we will minimize our kids' activities. While we thought we were fairly minimalist there with 1-2 per kid, we have loved having fewer plans. We really want to bring back some of the wonderful things we used to do, but with more intentionality. I'm seriously wondering if homeschooling is a permanent lifestyle change for us. This is a big mind-shift since I have an EdD and devoted my career to public schooling PreK and up. But we are finding that homeschooling really fits our family culture. I really hope to do it next year at least since we want to do it when we can really invest in our community and relationships as well as in our home.
I love the shift to on line meetings. It's been fantastic. The meetings I could never make because of the commute and the time when the meetings took place? They are on Zoom. The conferences I needed three or more days to attend? I merely log in from my computer, because they are on Zoom as well.
First off I should say that I extremely blessed, working full-time in content marketing at home and that my husband is on partially paid leave, not furloughed. In regular times my husband is away 3-6 days a week as a commercial pilot, so I’ve had my husband home since March. It’s been better than I ever could’ve imagined. He’s amazing. Always willing to do what’s needed. Someone who likes to cook! I honestly don’t know what I’m going to do when he goes back to work. I know this can’t last and am extremely fortunate, so I will enjoy it while I can.
I have been thinking quite a bit of the Josef Piper piece you retweeted this week on acedia and magnanimity, and the tweet someone posted in relation to this that sloth is the “refusal to take responsibility for joy."
After years working at Fordham as a therapist and a grad student in Spirituality / Ethics, I quit to be a stay at home mom four years ago. I mourned my job for a long time, and recently I had been slipping into ennui and acedia. Rediscovering this “responsibility for joy” and magnanimity towards my vocation has been my experience during the pandemic.
Practically, the biggest thing that has changed is that I homeschool now - not distance learning, but independent homeschool. We have curated activities to the ones that truly matter. This allows our girls more time to play and more time for us to spend together as a family. We have become more intentional about relationships, now that we can’t relay on casual contact anymore. I would like this to continue.
We have also learned to take more notice of the vulnerability of others. This year the girls rode along with me when I delivered Thanksgiving baskets to people in the community, many of them elderly, who need assistance (yes, they social distanced and wore masks.) They did not do things like this in the community when they were in school all day and busy with too many activities in the evening. My children have also become more aware in general of those who are vulnerable; they see the them now, and they are getting a sense of interconnected responsibility towards them as members of society. I think that is probably one of most valuable things many of us have gotten out of this pandemic.
As we build back I want to do so carefully. While homeschooling doesn't work for everyone (and I am very aware of the struggle of working families that suffer from lack of childcare), I would love to see how education for my children can continue to work outside of the 9-3:30, 5 days a week model in a single building, and can instead become a more intentional experience of being integrated into family and community. I want to hold on to our additional family time. I want my children to continue to notice and develop sensitivity towards the vulnerability of others around us.
And from a spiritual perspective, I want to hold onto the sense of magnanimity towards our vocation and "responsibility for joy" that we have rediscovered.
Neither of my jobs allows for remote work just by the nature of the thing (cleaning floors in the wake of several busy bakers is not something you can do over Zoom, for example), but two things that have made this year much easier for me have been because of COVID.
At one of my jobs, part-time workers (which is almost all of us) get paid sick days if we have Covid-like symptoms. This means if we get sick, even if it's just the less deadly flu, we can stay home without worrying about our paychecks. Which means fewer sick people have been stuffing themselves with medicine and dragging themselves into work (and sharing germs with the rest of us), and so we've actually seen less sickness overall. Also, people have actually been washing their hands, people give each other personal space, we're not handling items from members of the public. . . and so, I've gone without catching an infectious disease (and I say this without exaggeration) longer than ever before in my life. If people could remember the benefits of just these two relatively simple things when the threat of death is no longer attached, the future could be noticeably better.
The flexibility of working from home has meant that I've been taking care of myself much better than I was before. Now that I'm just walking into the living room instead of riding the train to work, I'm getting more sleep and have more time in the morning to spend in prayer. I can eat dinner when I'm hungry instead of commuting home with a growling stomach, and even when they're quick, my dinners are healthier and more filling. I'm exercising more often because I don't have to fit a trip to the gym around my work schedule. I hope post-COVID there are companies willing to accommodate this kind of work-life balance--sometimes it seems like "work-life balance" at many companies just means "we won't force you to work after 6 pm and also there are some good restaurants in the area you could go to at lunch".
I've also been a better worker while working from home, without spending extra time working. I write marketing copy, which means I spent most of my day staring at various Google docs. But while working from home, if I get stuck on an assignment, I can go unload the dishwasher or take a walk to get my brain moving again. I have the silence and space that creates better writing, which is so difficult to replicate in an office. I loved my office and miss it, but it's undeniable that offices are bad spaces to nurture good writing. My dream office would make space for people doing creative work to get up from the computer and do something else for a while, instead of monitoring whether or not we're sitting at our desks. (And writers would get big signs we could put up on our desks that said "IF IT'S NOT ON FIRE, ASK ME LATER".)
Lastly, the pandemic has exposed to me how much of my life in public was driven by FOMO, jealousy, and other people's expectations. I work(ed) downtown in a major city, so every workday was like being bombarded by tempting possibilities: I should get a new leather bag, I should buy a fancy sandwich in the food hall, I should take an international vacation like my coworkers, I should upgrade my phone... The things I actually wanted and needed were being buried under my attempts to resist these tugs at my desire, I was grumpy and restless, and I questioned a lot of my choices. Now it's all just...gone. No one is doing anything to be jealous of, and spending time with myself has made my actual desires and longings easier to identify. It turns out when I'm not exposed to this flurry of alluring objects, they lose their allure and my real hopes and dreams are more solid and wholesome, like "write something great" and "be a mom". I hope that when I'm back out in the world, I can hold onto this sense of my true self and not get sucked in again by everyone else's choices.
One of the great blessings of this pandemic is it tore away the blinders so many of us carried - about how 'compassionate' our status quo has been. Essential workers requiring food stamps to get by and lacking health insurance, people making more on unemployment than they did working full time, the unsustainability and inhumanity of the 80 hr weeks....
The question of 'how' to build back better is a fascinating one. How do we get the needs of workers met - or at least taken seriously - by their employers? How do we provide adequate health insurance? Adequate housing? Adequate social supports?
And who has already been doing this work ardently for decades?
Obviously I'm biased, but stronger labor unions, and more omnipresent unionization, would make a huge difference. It's the fastest way to legally create the pressure and the contracts to sustain these changes. And labor has been doing the hard work of advocacy for workers and families for generations.
As a grad student, having lectures for my classes automatically recorded has been invaluable. Now if I have to miss a lecture for any reason, I can watch the recording instead of trying to make sense of (often very badly written) lecture notes. There's also the typical benefit of having a bit more time to cook and keep my apartment cleaner using the time I would otherwise have spent commuting. Now that I have a home office set up fairly nicely, I anticipate that once we can return to the office, I will stay home on days when I don't have in-person classes or meetings.
Honestly, not a whole lot else has gotten better. Some folks in academia are very excited about remote conferences, and I can see how they are a great option for parents of young children, people with health conditions, etc., but I just find them so much less energizing and interesting. I really miss having in-person meetings--there's nothing online that can really compare to working on a whiteboard with someone else. I miss department social events and find the online ones pretty terrible.
I definitely enjoy the shift to more remote work. I'm a social worker working with individuals experiencing homelessness in central New Jersey and much of my work is done on the phone which I'm able to do from home. This does create an issue of being able to mentally separate from my work but I'm getting better at that and I do still enjoy going into the office a few days a week and meeting clients in the field. My husband manages a small independent hardware store so his work has not shifted online at all, but the new emphasis on shopping local has helped his business.
I definitely think that the pandemic has changed my priorities in a way that I appreciate. I've definitely lost the feeling of competition with my friends and other people I know who I feel are "ahead" of me or something, and FOMO has been replaced by a deepened appreciation for relationships and community. I mean, I'd still like to be able to go out to dinner, but I definitely appreciate this slower pace and I'm in no rush to be busy again (outside work. I'm plenty busy there).
working from home gives me much more time to write. I'm also spending a lot more time with my family. rather than being driven crazy, I feel like I've gotten so much closer to my sister, who works right across from me in our kitchen nook.
I had quit my job in January and was teaching a college course when COVID hit. The plan was for me to regroup and take a self-funded "sabbatical" as I determined next steps for my career. The next step ended up being homeschooling. So I went from a Research Scientist/Project Associate working part-time while my kindergartener and second grade twins were in school to a homeschooling mother. It has been mind-blowing. We hope that post-COVID we will minimize our kids' activities. While we thought we were fairly minimalist there with 1-2 per kid, we have loved having fewer plans. We really want to bring back some of the wonderful things we used to do, but with more intentionality. I'm seriously wondering if homeschooling is a permanent lifestyle change for us. This is a big mind-shift since I have an EdD and devoted my career to public schooling PreK and up. But we are finding that homeschooling really fits our family culture. I really hope to do it next year at least since we want to do it when we can really invest in our community and relationships as well as in our home.
I love the shift to on line meetings. It's been fantastic. The meetings I could never make because of the commute and the time when the meetings took place? They are on Zoom. The conferences I needed three or more days to attend? I merely log in from my computer, because they are on Zoom as well.
First off I should say that I extremely blessed, working full-time in content marketing at home and that my husband is on partially paid leave, not furloughed. In regular times my husband is away 3-6 days a week as a commercial pilot, so I’ve had my husband home since March. It’s been better than I ever could’ve imagined. He’s amazing. Always willing to do what’s needed. Someone who likes to cook! I honestly don’t know what I’m going to do when he goes back to work. I know this can’t last and am extremely fortunate, so I will enjoy it while I can.