I began vacation with three noticeable tan lines on various
patches of my skin. The strangest was the pale, zigzagging Z from Chaco straps
across my feet. T-shirt sleeves had left a sharp divide between my office paper
white shoulders and tanned arms. And then there was the oval marking the top of
my left wrist, with a narrow band reaching around to the pale underside.
Most of the past two weeks before vaca had been spent
outdoors on youth trips. We hiked in pine forests and did outdoor urban
projects. Almost always, I was carefully watching my watch, managing the time
of the group, calling out clock-based audibles for the rest of the day ahead: “4
minute bathroom break, then we’re off to high ropes,” or “Let’s try and be in
and out of Culver’s in 30 minutes so we can make it home before dark,” or “We
all need to shower by 8pm reflection times, so be quick.”
I spend a lot of my work days doing this frequent watch
checking exercise. The job of pastor necessitates it. It would be easy for a
hospital visit to stretch to over an hour; it would be simple for a lunch with
a youth or member to carry on into the afternoon; it would be a gift to nestle
in for a morning of reading and journaling and pay attention to nothing else.
But the job always demands and invites such a variety of tasks that time must
be managed, watches must be glanced at, Google calendars must be tracked with
care. This is the life of figuring out how to be a full time intern pastor, a
part time graduate student, a newish husband, and a new chocolate lab owner …
and of course I also write this as someone who loves shooting hoops, tending my
backyard garden, catching a West Wing episode,
or exploring a new place in Des Moines. I write this knowing that we all, of
course, do our own circus-like juggling acts, but with so many evenings taken
by meetings, I find that I schedule most of my days from 7a to 9p.
So I arrived in Maine in early August after the trips and a
full year of not taking consistent vacation days. We arrived late, crashed
hard, and woke up in the morning to the sun rising at 5:30am on the Kennebec
River. I laid in bed wondering about what it was like for centuries of humans
who tracked time based on sunlight. I wondered how much truth there is to the
tale that our own circadian rhythms function best when aligned with nature.
And so, I took off the watch. I put it in a pocket inside my
backpack. It remained there for seven holy days.
It’s amazing what you notice when life is more than “tick,
tick, tick…..” Birdsong. Grasshopper mouths chewing sideways. Eating when your
body says “I’m hungry” rather than because a certain time says you should put
some calories in your mouth.
Better yet, by the time we reached Acadia on Mount Desert
Island, we dropped off the grid of cell service and experienced total freedom
from distraction. I’m not exaggerating to say that my experience felt like
waking from a screen-induced coma of small dopamine hits from email alerts or a
new Instagram post or ESPN updates. Instead, we grasped the long lasting
pleasure of oxytocin experienced through panoramic views of nature and revitalized
relationships and the bonding experiences of a sweaty beautiful hike.
Taking off the watch has become a spiritual practice of off
days for me. I plunge into uncharted time, let the ticking fade, and settle
into a much more ancient way of living. Maybe that’s the whole point of calling
certain days of the week “time off” – as in, literally remove it from your
body. I know of no better way to heal in this over-functioning world.
