Work Wiser, Not Harder
We have just moved through the midpoint of the year, summer solstice — midsummer, the longest day of the year as the sun remained in stillness at its apex. The northern hemispheric axis of our planet now begins a slow tilting away from the sun as we move towards autumn and winter, and the gradual shortening of the days.
The rhythms of these slow, seasonal shifts are the ways that the Earth observes time. They’re the ways that our bodies, that belong to the Earth, are designed to observe time.
My husband Oli and I gave ourselves the day off with no real agenda of doing anything much except to be guided by the currents of this special day. This used to be so very difficult for me to do when I first moved to the desert from a lifetime of existing in the matrix of busy-ness and distraction. Surrendering to and trusting in the natural rhythms of the day, the season, of my body, of listening and doing when necessary in response to the guidance of Nature within - my intuition - didn’t feel safe.
This lack of trust was a major issue. Like countless others, I had been trained not to have confidence in the treasury of my own intuition, and in the wisdom of my body. Whatever the season, there had to be a set number of hours during the day designated for working, during a set number of days a week. A set number of hours for rest and leisure. And a set number of ‘days off’ for activities and such. If I worked really hard, eating into the designated leisure or resting time, I was ‘a good, hardworking person’, a model human being who deserved to be rewarded. But if my body happened to need more rest than usual, or my soul happened to need more time doing fun or pleasurable things, or simply just daydreaming (all of which were nourishing my creativity) I was ‘lazy’ and ‘worthless'.
Meanwhile, the wisdom of Nature shows us that rest is in fact dynamic - that it nurtures and potentiates the best conditions for creativity and aligned action.
Consider this: the 40 hour work week was put in place by Henry Ford in 1926 to achieve maximum output and productivity by the people who worked for his automotive company, Ford.
Weekends were allotted as ample time for workers to go out and spend the money they earned.
Ford’s 40 hour week ended up becoming the standardized structure and definition of work. And as we know, workers who exceed (and who are expected to exceed) those 40 hours are celebrated and rewarded, creating a culture where overwork, burnout and busy-ness are badges of honor.
(Interestingly, Ford’s 40 hour week was a decrease in how much people had been expected to work until then, after he discovered that working longer hours did not actually yield an increase in productivity.)
Ford, with his standardized work week, was simply expressing an ‘ideal’ that had been set in motion with the Industrial Revolution, where humans were no longer considered human be-ings with unique cycles and rhythms but standardized machines: workers + consumers. This mechanized perspective became the foundation of having a good ‘work ethic’.
Our value came down to how much time we spent working, rather than on the quality of our life force and creative energy. An amount of money was allocated to the amount of time spent, and that was that: the worth of a human being reduced to the volume of time spent laboring.
This is the unsustainable culture of more, more, more – without pause - that we find ourselves in now.
Do you see how this is antithetical to Nature? And do see how this is also how we treat Nature - as workhorse and standardized commodity?
But Nature, which we’re a part of, has her seasons and rhythms. She “never rushes, yet everything is accomplished” - to borrow from Lao Tzu.
Artist unknown
What if, like Nature, we chose to work wiser instead of harder? What would that even look and feel like? Does it cause a subtle (or perhaps intense) sense of panic that you ‘wouldn’t get everything done’?
If there’s panic or anxiety, that’s the program of mistrust in your Self that’s been installed in your psyche, in the same way that we’ve learned to mistrust land and soil and poison her/us with chemicals and hormones to make her produce more, relentlessly, while degrading her life force.
What if we decided to remove the toxic fertilizer of ‘should’ from our lives? Would everything fall apart? Or just the things that were ready to fall away, like leaves in autumn?
What if we unchained our bodies from systems that have degraded human + Nature to standardized machines of incessant productivity, and chose instead the boldness of trusting in our own seasons + rhythms?
And from this place of courage, what if we released the pathologized fiction of ‘laziness’ from our beings, understanding instead that when we’re aligned with our own unstandardized + organic cycles, we’re participating in an infinite organizing power - more elegant than any machine?
From this place of Nature-supported courage, we can be the change-makers that the Earth is asking us to be at this time. We can advocate for ourselves and each other with resourced and resilient nervous systems.
In themselves, beliefs are not true. They are constructs of meaning around which we organize our behavior and create our realities. Do you see how the belief systems that our culture and society have organized themselves around are in violation of Nature? And when we’re in violation of Nature, we encounter suffering - the messenger letting us know that we need to course correct.
See through, dissolve and compost Nature-violating systems - their time is over. Turn towards the wisdom of Nature - within + without - and create new beliefs in symbiosis with a mysterious symmetry that we’re inseparable from.
You don’t have to do this alone.
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