rest : mackenzian

November 5, 2017 By Keisha McKenzie

Falling back

The evening after the clocks go back an hour isn’t the longest day of the year. For me, it only feels like it is.

The light is super bright in the morning, lunchtime hits fast, and in the early afternoon, the shadows race in as if they’ve been held at bay all year and we’ve finally let them loose.

At least for us in the northern hemisphere, the season of scarves and blankets is approaching. Trees strip and temperatures drop; it’s a time of reflecting, simplifying, and putting to rest. In the midst of festivals and shared meals, it can also be a time for clarity too.

Maybe that’s why a story from Chip and Dan Heath’s book Made to Stick stood out to me today. Derek Sivers tells it like this:

Teacher had students write headline. Gave them all these facts: ‘Ken Peters, principal of Beverly Hills High School, announced that the entire faculty will travel to Sacramento next Thursday for a colloquium in new teaching methods. Among the speakers will be anthropologist Margaret Mead… etc’

Most students rearranged those facts into a basic AP one-sentence headline. Finally the teacher said, ‘The [lede] to the story is “THERE WILL BE NO SCHOOL ON THURSDAY!”‘

It’s not about regurgitating the facts, but about figuring out the point.” —Derek Sivers

I’ve shared elements of my winter reflection routine before. It’s come a little early this year as I’m in the middle of some vocational changes (more on what’s new soon).

It’s so easy to get distracted, though.

This year has been brim-full of facts and background details: new work and reports and talks and interviews and trips. But the facts are not the point. “Figuring out the point” is the point. And, as Sivers explains, I need to create room in my lifeworld and schedule to do that figuring. I need to fall back.

I wonder how much this is also true for intractable community questions—like how to transcend the cycle of “preventable tragedy” followed by “thoughts and prayers.” Or how to encourage religious communities to include and minister to people rather than expel or resist them.

There are reams of details in these questions, many of them philosophical, political, or theological. And parsing all those details can mean losing time or will to figure out the actual point.

At a conference in St. Louis last week, I suggested to some colleagues that we refocus on the cosmic questions: bigger questions that cover more scenarios than we can yet imagine so that the bigger answers we come up with are truly big enough for real people to live in with all our baggage, variances, and shifting needs.

Maybe, I said, the cosmic question isn’t who may marry, or serve in the military, or be ordained, or get a job and keep it, or be a church member, or—

Maybe the cosmic question is who counts as human and therefore gets to live in a world that supports their flourishing.

Maybe that’s the point, and the rest is detail.

And maybe it’ll be impossible to see that unless we zoom out from the most recent instance of a pattern, the latest tragedy, or the status quo’s newest target.

May 6, 2017 By Keisha McKenzie

Labor and rest

Sometimes it can be helpful to read one of my cultural traditions from another perspective. I’ve read most about the Sabbath recently from Jewish writers and evangelical Protestant theologians.

But today my devotional brought me this query from Quakers in the southwest region of the United States:

Have you taken a day of rest and restoration this week?” —Evangelical Friends Church Southwest

Why, yes, I said to myself. Yes, I have. And tomorrow I have the hard-won privilege of being able to take another.

On International Worker’s Day six days ago, many around the world commemorated the rights, regulations, and conventions that labor movements have fought for over the last few centuries.

The standard eight-hour work-day—which divides the 24-hour day into equal segments for work, sleep, and free time—is one such regulation. The two-day weekend is another. I’ve valued it most when my jobs have required I work through either Saturday or Sunday.

(Yes, labor at churches is still labor! Ask your nearby minister.)

But evangelical Quakers aren’t asking about regular rest in solidarity with international labor. Nor are they following the Seventh-day Adventist concern for the observance of the Ten Commandments or “moral law” on a specific weekday.

Rather, the Friends’ interest is in living in acknowledgment of God throughout life:

First generation Friends on the other hand did not feel that God was calling them to observe a particular sabbath day – much to the consternation of mainline Protestants. Small wonder after their meeting for worship these Friends would open their businesses and serve their fellow humans with honesty and caring. These Friends were, in other words serving the Lord even though, government officials often arrested the true Christians for ‘breaking the Sabbath.'” —Arthur Berk

“We do not need to long for a particular day,” Berk explains. “He is present always.”

That principle of pervading presence is the community’s historical status quo, but some Friends are experimenting with the rite of disrupting their typical schedules and choosing not to work as normal anyway.

Some, like the Jewish and allied community of the Reboot initiative, choose to unplug from the internet and mobile technologies and recenter with family and friends.

Even when it’s philosophically inconvenient, humans love habit and structure. And sometimes that tendency can help us recover attention, presence, and grounding that our wider culture’s habits make it hard for us to live into every day.

Having access to these benefits shouldn’t be a matter of privilege, and part of seeking a more just world has to mean changing our social cultures so that it no longer is.

May 4, 2017 By Keisha McKenzie

Choosing when to answer

I’ve had an email draft sitting in one of my accounts for about a year and a half.

It’s a compilation of links and research summaries that would have made a very good answer to a question from a friend of a friend. I spent more than half an hour searching Google and skimming abstracts for them. I organized the best results, interpreted the findings, and summarized them to make the list easier to read.

Then, just for kicks, I checked the word count: nearly 1,000. I laughed at myself, hit “save,” and abandoned the entire thing.

About two years before that moment, I had an extended back-and-forth with someone who’d made a video trafficking in shoddy rhetoric about the LGBTQIA community but only wanted conversation about it if he could record it. (I don’t quite remember the comment that inspired me to swan-dive off that ship but the relief when I finally did was delicious.)

Part of social change work is having awkward conversations with new people and inviting folks to learn with us.

Yet a world that works for all doesn’t emerge from my exhausting myself or trampling my own boundaries in the name of being helpful. I get to choose when to answer. At any given moment, I can refer people who approach me to peers of mine with more energy, time, or patience, to other resources, to other sources.

And when I do that, the sky doesn’t fall. I can tag back in later.

Being on call means paying psychic penalties and sometimes physical ones as well. As Toni Morrison, Brittney Cooper, and Nora Berenstain have all noted, engaging and explaining the impacts of social oppression while still experiencing it involves both “a tax and a toll.”

Marginalized persons frequently have symptoms of psychological distress and trauma resulting from their experiences of oppression… In order for marginalized persons to do the labor of educating others about their oppression, they must first overcome the cognitive burden of dispelling the negative emotion associated with it. This makes performing educational labor about oppression significantly more costly for someone who experiences it than for someone who does not… When marginalized persons are called on to educate their oppressors, they bear increased cognitive and emotional costs that take a cumulative toll on their mental and physical health.” —Nora Berenstain, “Epistemic Exploitation“¹

It doesn’t matter whether, like me, you’re good at compiling answers to incoming queries about your social group. It doesn’t matter whether, like my daytime colleagues, you feel called to serve faith, community, and a vision of a just world by spending the best hours of the day surfing the news cycle and looking for opportunities to educate the willing public.

It matters whether you’re always on and whether you can ever step off.

It’s been a whole lifetime since last November, and the theme of rest has never been more salient. In my corner of the world, this week has been about anticipating and then responding to the Affordable Care Act repeal and the executive order on religious exemptions; prepping for a grant submission and gathering my stories and life learning for a—you guessed it—public education panel; and recovering from last week’s travel and planning next week’s events.

The days have been long and the nights have been short, and yet I’m fortunate not to be in personal crisis too. Things could be worse!

When you’re always on, and often-to-always in a position where you have to explain your experience as well as live it, cortisol becomes a companion and burnout is more a likely risk than a punchline. Sabbaths, vacations, breaks, deferrals, and silences—all of these are just as essential to progress as is full-throttle responsiveness. The pauses between notes are as much part of the musical experiences as are the sounds.

There are no prizes for dying on a treadmill. And not every excellent email needs to be sent.

Read all of Berenstain’s article. Read Cooper and Morrison in full too. This isn’t a post about never responding to inquiry or proactively informing others. It’s about having and taking at will the option to decline, to stop, or to change. Gifts that aren’t being freely given are being stolen—and that includes the gift of explanation.

This is not to say that a marginalized person cannot genuinely choose to engage with a privileged person on topics of the oppression they face. they may even choose to make themselves generally available as an educational resource about their oppression to those who want to learn about it and do not experience it. But it must be their choice rather than something that they are coerced into out of concern for their safety and well-being.” —Nora Berenstain

[Back to text: ◄]

April 20, 2017 By Keisha McKenzie

A few thoughts on rest

I’m leading a conversation this Saturday morning at the CityLights community. Find us near Union Square, New York City, from about 11 a.m. to about 2 p.m.

Post-Easter, the group’s starting a new talk series on the Sabbath and time. I’ve been reading a little Walter Brueggemann on rest and resistance lately, and I can’t wait to see how the folks in the room respond to it.

‘Self-care’ is one of the buzzwords of our time. We’re told we have the right to experience it, but very little about contemporary life—especially in the urbs and suburbs—supports the regular practice of individual or collective rest.

This Sabbath, Keisha invites us to look at Sabbath not in terms of creation (Exodus) but in terms of liberation (Deuteronomy). We’ll learn from the wisdom of theologians, activists, and other spiritual teachers, consider some of the forces that stand between us and rest, and share some of the tools and practices we’ve each learned to help us resist a culture of ‘endless production.'”

I’m not saying that you should come and join us if you already have plans elsewhere. I’m just saying that if you do, there will be hugs!

Some of you receive these posts every day; others, in a digest every Tuesday morning. However you get them, thank you for reading.

March 25, 2017 By Keisha McKenzie

The right to rest

I’ve always found this advice from Ohio’s Conservative Friends challenging.

These don’t seem to be the best times in the world for “gentleness” or “self-restraint.” And the quietist impulse to pull back in times of social turbulence—well, in the spirit of Frederick Douglass, I’m a little suspicious of that. “Who would be free, themselves must strike the blow,” Douglass once said, quoting Lord Byron.

But whenever this quote surfaces in my meditation time, and it frequently does thanks to the Quaker Advices and Queries app, I turn it over again just in case there’s something in it for me.

A few years ago, Walter Brueggemann wrote about Sabbath as an ancient ritual of resistance to oppression and endless production, and social commentators have taken that characterization to heart.

This year, I’m finding Sabbath a welcome reprieve not from endless production but from this year’s endless political turmoil. As I check out of the workweek, I also get to check out of the news cycle. I miss stories. I’m late on analyses. I don’t see that Really Smart or Really Funny thing for days. And that’s precisely what I need to forestall overwhelm.

Unlike the Conservative Friends, I wouldn’t say there’s more courage in gentleness than in denunciation. I’d simply say there’s courage in gentleness too.

I can rest long enough to step outside the social cloud of hyper-vigilance, but I don’t have to take so long that I lose the ability to see how The Powers’ work impacts vulnerable people and what action’s in my power to take.

We have the right to rest. We don’t have to drive ourselves as Pharaoh once drove the Israelites. And there are no prizes for dying on the treadmill.

As the new week begins, please join me in remembering that and planning accordingly.

January 26, 2017 By Keisha McKenzie

Resistance and humane planning

In a way, I’ve felt besieged for a few years now, not in the intense ways others in major cities have. But still, in the way that one who pays attention can’t help but notice creeping crawling unease, I’ve felt besieged.

I’ve joked with others who grew up fundamentalist about the opening of Revelation’s seals, but I know that November 8 wasn’t the day the skies opened and Pestilence, Famine, War, and Death rode out to do their special work.

And yet—

“[No. 45] intends to pay for the coming US-Mexico wall with a 20 percent tax on all imports coming from Mexico.” (NY Post)
“The White House intends to temporarily shut down travel from a wide swath of countries to the United States and implement dramatic restrictions on immigration and refugee admission,” including suspending the visa waiver system, expanding biometric records for non-citizens, and halving the number of refugees the US will receive. (Huffington Post)
“Agencies shall… ensure that their privacy policies exclude persons who are not United States citizens or lawful permanent residents from the protections of the Privacy Act regarding personally identifiable information.” (January 25 Executive Order on “public safety”)
“[No. 45’s] administration mandating EPA scientific studies, data undergo review by political staff before public release,” contra the agency’s internal scientific integrity policy (AP)
“The new EPA administration has asked that all contract and grant awards be temporarily suspended, effective immediately,” and agency staff were banned from publishing new web content or communicating with the public on social media or blogs (ProPublica, Huffington Post)

All that’s just Week 1.

It’s a lot, and it’s only just started.

If you’ve been paying attention for a while, and are feeling fatigued? That’s reasonable. If you’ve just started paying attention, and are feeling a little overwhelm? Also reasonable.

As I said this week during my conversation with the good folks of Pub Theology, it’s important to set boundaries around social engagement: we can’t go to all the protests and still have a life, and there are costs to being hyper-alert and always responsive.

It’s ok to rest. No, it’s good to rest.

My strategy is this:

Pick one issue, not all the issues.
Pick one peer group, not all the peer groups.
Pick one practical action to do with the peer group, not all the actions.
Do the action. Evaluate the action.
Eat salad and soup. Shower.
Take regular breaks from actions and being hyper-informed.
Do not neglect art and beauty.

A week ago I was wondering whether I needed to lay down my daily writing. This week, I’m sure I shouldn’t. For now, this is my one practical action. It forces me to slow down, to make something pretty or process something hard, and to reach out to others who I learn from or share with.

It’s a small quiet “No” that I can say through action every day, whether I join other social collective work or fall back from the front to recover.

This weekend, I’m switching off the horror. I know it’ll be there when I return on Monday. I’m going to write and transcribe and rest.

Join me.