rest and play – Page 2 – Callie J. Smith

On the Valuable Use of Time

I’ve been feeling the need to explain myself lately. Aware that I’ve put inordinate amounts of time into a hobby that I do (admittedly) love, I’ve felt the urge to defend myself (even if only to myself) about what I’ve been doing.

What have I been doing? I’ve been writing a novel. In the dark before winter dawns this past year, I was brainstorming in a little brown notebook, wondering what I’d get to vicariously experience through these characters and who, in fact, they might become. By spring, I was spending what morning time I could holed up at a computer desk by my back window, geeking out over how to cobble together a flow of scenes that felt satisfying. Now that summer’s almost past, those hours have added up to a lot of enjoyment, a manuscript draft finished, and – when I’m honest with myself – a lingering unease about how much time I’ve given to a “mere” hobby.

Do you ever do that? Do you pour time into a hobby or other interest and feel a tiny bit guilty at the thought that you could have done many other more sensible, productive, profitable, resume-worthy, socially conscious, or otherwise obviously valuable things with your time?

I do. Perhaps I’ve moved in one too many workaholic circles. Perhaps I’m facing realities that most of us face, knowing how these days our families must come up with way more money to even begin to afford the same basic things as before. For many reasons – I’m sure – I’ve felt a growing need to explain my use of valuable time for a “mere” hobby.

I’ve tried to articulate the value of what I’ve been doing by talking about it with friends and colleagues. I’ve brought it up boldly over lunch. I’ve admitted it off-handedly in a parking lot. I’ve named it quietly inside a car, staring ahead out the windshield and listening for what tone of voice would respond to break the silence. At each opportunity, I’ve taken the risk of sharing with another human being the fact that I’ve finished writing a novel manuscript.

I’ve explained the value of it in various ways. I’ve floated the idea of fiction allowing us to dip into different, more experiential ways of knowing than intellectual reflections and news reporting often allow. I’ve emphasized the importance of exploring underrepresented perspectives, noting how a main character in my novel agonizes over what to do with her experience of sexual harassment in the church. I’ve spoken of my writing again and again with an eye towards what meaningfulness it could hold for readers. In none of these conversations, I assure you, have I said anything that I did not believe to be entirely true.

The problem is that summer has nearly passed, and none of my conversations have fully represented, either to others or to myself, why I’ve been doing what I’ve been doing. I sense there’s so much more to why I’ve spent all the time I could immersed in this hobby.

What is the value of joy? I still don’t have the elevator speech or blog post to get at that. Not really.

I have to hand it to my conversation partners: when learning that I’ve poured enough time into a novel-writing hobby that I’ve actually completed a manuscript, not a single one of them has asked me why I’ve done it. Bless them for responding as if they assume value in how I spent that time. Perhaps they noticed something in my face or voice. It strikes me all the more, though, what unease I feel at spending time doing something whose value I haven’t fully defined for myself. Yes, I relish the process of doing it, but how well does that justify the time spent?

Where have you landed with the value of your own hobbies or non-professional interests? How have they been speaking to you lately?

As I sit with these questions, I’m sitting with my unease of not precisely knowing answers. Perhaps I’m taking this opportunity to practice lacking clarity and finding ways to do that with grace. Perhaps I’m toying with the idea that explanations, especially for things like enjoyment or gladness, are not always required. Perhaps I’m noticing how many people and pursuits can call out to us, as it were, for reasons that we don’t totally understand. I suspect human beings are always encountering the voice of God in new ways, and certainly, learning new ways of hearing (or seeing, or knowing, or evaluating) just downright takes time and practice.

For now, daylight hours in the midwestern United States are lessening again with the waning of summer. I’m once again taking moments in the dark before dawn to sip coffee and see what happens in the pages of that little brown notebook. I’m working on a second manuscript. I’m also keeping an eye on my text messages, knowing that a friend who communicates by text is reading my first novel manuscript even now. I’m really curious what he’ll say.

I feel a little scared, but I feel excited, too. I’m practicing, both with how to write fiction and with how to balance a life. Both fumbling and feedback provide chances to learn. In fact, I feel hopeful to be catching glimpses of myself in these moments of not needing to know or understand the why/when/what/how of everything. That means I’m open, and I trust that time spent opening oneself up to the not-yet-knowns of life will indeed hold a special kind of value.

I’m also trusting that one way or another I’ll be sharing with you some part of what I’ve been working on. Time will tell, of course, but I look forward to knowing what it tells.

The Beauty of Rest

“Look!”

His brakes screeched as the bike came to a stop. I caught up and slowed to a stop behind him. My friend pointed to the side of the trail.

“Do you know what these are?”

I looked down.

“Mayapples?”

“Mayapples. You know they’re native to Indiana?”

I nodded. With that, he dove into a story of Indiana-grown mayapples helping to develop the anti-cancer extract VP-16.

Our rides went like this. Though born and raised in Indiana, I learned quickly that my Syrian-born cycling friend knew vastly more about Indiana flora than I did. He kept pausing to share what he’d learned. He slowed down to describe culinary uses of Paw Paw fruit or virtues of the Osage Orange wood as those trees came into view. He stopped to gently nudge fungi and point out a slug he found breakfasting on the surface of it. Suffice it to say, our rides included many pauses.

At first, this troubled me.

I felt defensive. I knew all too well that I had fewer bike skills and less speed than he did. I suspected that his botany lectures were, in fact, him surreptitiously taking pity on me and slowing down so I could catch up. The idea hurt my pride.

So, I focused on gaining speed. I had a clear goal. Soon, when he braked and paused with his bike, my friend found me right there behind him.

In retrospect, it doesn’t surprise me that I set my goal on speed. I’ve used speed and similar types of accomplishment (e.g., productivity) to evaluate many activities. When I first met this cycling friend in 2021, that tendency of mine towards accomplishment had gone into overdrive.

I’d thrown myself into my professional life, a satisfying thing since it involved goals and missions I value. I took my work’s problems and ideas with me to the bike trail to mull over. I had work to do with people of faith in settings that sought to serve God’s transformation of the world, and there were tight timetables on which to do this work. How could I not keep on and keep up with the tasks at hand?

Then, I met my friend. Neither of us had many cycling buddies who liked morning rides as we did, so we began riding together. Over time, I discovered a couple of important things about this man’s relationship to speed, productivity, and related metrics of success.

First, I discovered that my friend had plenty of reasons, himself, to value speed and accomplishment. An intensive care doctor in a local hospital, he had people to care for and lives to save. He had crucial work to do and much of it. Though he spoke very little to me about the stresses and strains of an intensive care ward during the pandemic, I saw those days take their toll.

“So sorry,” he’d text me some mornings after an overnight shift in the hospital, canceling our ride. “Need to sleep.”

I could only imagine. Voices of the frontline people I knew had been registering exhaustion for some time. In my own work with religious leaders, I’d heard inspiring stories of creativity and adaptability, of fearless ministry in the face of one strain of Covid-19 after another as our culture made its way through 2020 and 2021. I also heard their weariness, and I heard it at a level I’d not heard it before. In my own little corner of ministry I hopefully helped some people, and I also I felt myself wearing down.

“Come to me, all you who are weary and are carrying heavy burdens,” Jesus says in the gospel of Matthew, “and I will give you rest” (11:28). At different times in my life, different images have suggested to me what that kind of rest might look like. Lately, I’ve pictured my cycling friend pausing along bike trails. I’ve been noticing that he seems to relish those pauses. I’ve realized that my speed (or lack thereof) has had nothing to do with how refreshed I felt after a ride.

That was the second thing I learned about my friend: he measured good rides by what we stopped or slowed to see. Even when he no longer needed to pause for me to catch up to him, he still stopped to examine redbud trees in vivid bloom, grape hyacinths in the brush, a blue heron perched in the shallows of a river. He was eager to share words and wonder at what we’d stumbled upon. When I realized that, I realized that I enjoyed those pauses, too.

In fact, I needed those moments to stop and notice the world around me. I needed pauses in my days, and I needed them in my value system. The Jesus who calls us to love our neighbors as ourselves is also the Jesus who offers rest as part of God’s kind of love. He must have known people needed rest, even people committed to doing good in his name. Perhaps the God who commanded Sabbath tends to have more sympathy for the ebb and flow of creaturely energy than we sometimes do.

I’m still learning this. Though I’ve worked with congregations for years around topics of rest and renewal, I’m not immune to the call of speed, productivity, and accomplishment. They do measure meaningful things. However, other measures, equally faithful but vastly different measures, do exist. Take rest, for example, and a faithful balance between accomplishment and rest.

I’ve needed a lot of rest lately, more than I needed before the pandemic. I’m still experimenting with rest as a faithful choice. I’m practicing saying “no.” I find that can feel especially difficult in religious settings and ministry. In any given situation, though, I’m honestly not certain if people around me associate faithfulness and worth with unending work. It might only be me who’s making that association. Regardless, I’m practicing that balance of “yes” with the adequate rest carved out by “no.”

I’m also continuing to pause with my cycling friend. I’ve found those morning rides can help balance my day.

“Oh wow,” my friend said recently, lowering his phone. We’d paused so he could take a picture of morning mist over a field of wildflowers. “What a beautiful ride. Isn’t this gorgeous?”

“It is,” I agreed, taking a couple deep breaths before we moved on.

When we approached the long incline of a hill, my friend called to me.

“You were getting so fast that you could leave me in the dust when you wanted to. I’ve been training harder, though. I’m ready to race you,” he said. Pointing at the hill up ahead, he added with a grin, “Get ready. I’m going to beat you.”

“We’ll see about that,” I said, returning his grin.

And off we went.

This essay originally appeared in the June 13, 2022 issue of Bearings Online.

In the Wake of Pain and the Gold of Care

“How’s your back doing?” my father would ask with a hope-you’re-okay smile from across the dinner table.

He struggled to remember many things during the last years of his life, but he remembered that my back was hurting. Perhaps he worried, knowing at his age how pain can accumulate and weigh us down. I felt that weight on the morning my mother called to tell me he’d died. That news hurt like nothing I’d experienced before.

I didn’t quite know what to do with myself in those days, and one of the ways I dealt with that involved riding a mountain bike trail near my home. Something about the position of reaching for handlebars felt like a relief to my back, and something about the physical movement felt like a relief to my heart and mind.

Deer came to the trail, too, most days. I’d watch them lift their heads from grazing to watch me. Turtles piled on top of each other on a log in the river. Dragonflies darted above prairie grass. I’d often catch myself making a mental note to tell my father about them the next time we talked. Then, I’d remember he was gone. I’d take a deep breath to keep from crying. He’d loved animals. I’d gotten practice loving what he loved.

Though I didn’t see many people at first out there at the trail, I knew that other people must be spending a great deal of time there, too. Someone had hung a wooden sign on a branch along the way that declared, “Peace.” Unseen others would cut back brush from the path and, after storms, move aside fallen branches for those who came after. I started doing a bit of the same. It felt comforting to find myself in a place where people cared for things and for each other. I don’t think it mattered whether I gave the care or received it, but only that I found myself in the middle of it.

I tried to take care with the people I did eventually start finding. I saw an older hiker with a walking stick one day and asked him from behind if I could pass. He jumped and turned around with worried eyes. I felt bad for surprising him and promised myself I’d ring my bell next time so as not to surprise anyone else.

Before the next hiker, though, I surprised myself. Pedaling through a narrow space I’d often cleared before, my foot got stuck this time in the knotty base of a tree. I fell with my bike down a hill and laid in a fern patch, waiting to feel what might begin to hurt. I became aware of something other than pain, though. I became aware that I could almost hear my father asking: “How’s your back doing?”

I’d thought of him so often out there in the woods as I rode. Pain may accumulate, but so can care, and I’d received so much of his care over the years. Warm memories stored up inside of me seemed to have begun rising back to the surface—slowly, here and there—in the quiet of the woods.

Like gold that a kintsugi artist uses to fill cracks in what she repairs, a sense of care seemed to have begun flowing through the cracks left in me by my father’s death. His love hadn’t died, really. It was more that I was finding his presence with me in different ways.

Laying there in the fern patch where I’d fallen that day, I actually whispered out loud, “I think my back’s okay,” as if my father were still asking. I stood and climbed gingerly up the hill. I still felt a little “off,” of course. When I saw the hiker with the walking stick soon after, I reached for the bell on my handlebars and found nothing. Had the bell broken off? I came to an awkward stop to look for it. When I glanced up, I saw the hiker had stopped to watch me.

“I meant to ring my bell and warn you,” I explained. “I just couldn’t find it.”

He smiled. “That’s okay,” he said. “I heard you coming this time.”

I’d needed that smile. It wasn’t my father’s smile, but it still touched me somewhere deep to be seen in a way that made another human being smile. I grinned back and wished him a good hike. As I rode on, I pulled the bell right-side-up onto my handlebars from under the shift lever, where I’d found it. I gave it a test ding.

“You found it!” yelled the hiker from somewhere behind me. I heard laughter in his voice.

From then on, the hiker—he introduced himself as John—would watch for me and step aside, always waiting with a warm expression on his face. It became a favorite part of my bike ride to find him and others with whom I could smile, grin, or laugh. A young jogger with a large dog, two women on bikes thrilled to see another female, a father and a son resting from their ride who clapped when they saw me trying, and trying, and finally making it to the top of a difficult hill—we all had smiles for each other. It felt like dwelling in a form of care together, too.

In the wake of my pain, flowing through those days like kintsugi gold, I found the warmth and presence of other lives with mine. I even found that my father’s love, woven so inextricably into my own life, seemed not so very absent, after all. Care went with me. I tried to remember this. When pain would come, as it does, I would try to remember and to watch for the gold of care that so often flows in its wake.

It helped when I had my worst fall yet from my bike. I found myself on the ground with pain in my back and chest deepening. I tried to remember not to get discouraged as I made it home and then to my doctor. I explained to him what parts of me hurt—right, left, front, back, all of it. He grimaced when I mentioned how I’d fallen, but his face held no judgement. I’d learned over time that this doctor smiled brightest when talking about mountain bikes, and I saw that smile clearly begin to emerge when we’d determined that I had no fractures.

By the time I was laying on a table for electrotherapy on my spasming back muscles, he and I were chatting about bike skills and laughing. The laughter hurt even more, but I didn’t care. I suspected it helped me as much as the electrotherapy did. When it was time to go, I got up slowly and walked towards the door.

“Have a good weekend, Callie,” the doctor said with a hope-you’re-okay tone of voice.

I looked back and smiled. I thought I just might.

This essay originally appeared on the November 21, 2021 A Kintsugi Life blog.