My First Sabbath

Image credit: Photo by Saad.Akhtar Licensed under Creative Commons

Last week, oddly inspired by the humorous book The Year of Living Biblically, I decided I wanted to try to add a little Sabbath into my own life.  Couldn't I use a day of rest once a week, even if I didn't have an organized religion backing me up?  And because I'm not part of any organized religion, I'm not bound to keep my Sabbath on a Judeo-Christian Saturday or Sunday.  In fact, I didn't want to.  After all, if you have kids (or maybe just if you have my kids), you'll know that "rest" and "the kids have a day off from school" are far (very, very far) from complimentary for parents.  So, I decided to pick the more convenient (to me) Wednesday instead.  Yep, it'll just be me and the Anglo-Saxon pagans who worship Woden, for whom the day is named...

Wednesday has the advantage of being the day of the week the kids are least likely to have off of school, because the district wisely schedules Mondays and Fridays off instead whenever possible.  It's also the day when a local meditation group meets, meaning I've already got mediation right there on the schedule.  The only problem was that last Wednesday was Veteran's Day, and my kids had no school, throwing my "pick a day when the kids will be in school" plan off right from the start.  Nonetheless, I decided to give Sabbath a try, and the day went well overall.  I can't say there was much rest or spiritual revelation, but I did manage to keep the computer off from bedtime on Tuesday to breakfast on Thursday (in spite of having the kids tempt me to turn my laptop back on several times by asking that I look up the answers to everything from what kinds of animals reproduce asexually to when Grandma's plane would arrive for Christmas).  And I got to spend a relatively quiet day with the kids.

In the intervening few days, I've been thinking about how I want to structure my newly holy Wednesdays, and I've come up with a few guidelines, at least to start.  These only apply only to me, which is yet another reason I scheduled it during the week:

• No electronics: no computer, no TV and no video games (with a few exceptions).


• No sugar. (I'm definitely going to have to ease into this one.)


• Time dedicated to prayer and meditation.


• Time dedicated to physical exercise (which I don't get enough of): yoga, walks, dancing. For the time being, I've decided to exempt the iPod (inside the house only), Wii Fit and Dance Dance Revolution from the electronics ban in order to encourage aerobic exercise.


• Household chores, reading and writing may be done in moderation as long as a focus on mental, spiritual and/or physical health can be maintained.  (In other words, I'm going to have to see how and whether these will fit in, since I know that I, personally, have the potential to overdo and misuse all three.)


• Focus on being present for family members when they are home.

This week will be my first opportunity to see how the day will work in practice, and I'm really looking forward to it.

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This post originally published at The Second Road.