Dear community, how are you all doing?
Are you, like me, finding yourself looking for ways to create more time, more space to be present? To catch up, to catch your breath, to rest, to reflect? To mark the swinging out of pandemic time and into the public sphere? To notice that we are now in a different era, unable to return to the innocence of pre-Covid but no longer able to rest in the imposed pandemic quietude? To navigate weird and unsettling political times, ongoing disparities, deepening climate realities and grinding inflationary economic pressures? We need to take a breath and create a little space. Lay on the ground and gaze up at the blue sky and clouds.
There is something remarkable that happens when we consciously choose to create space. To do so may require saying “no” or “not right now” to a commitment or renegotiating a relationship. Yet there is potency in choosing to do so, especially when it is hard. Only by intentionally making the space for something new to arise will something new come into being. Only by creating time can we more fully inhabit our life and relationship with self, with body and mind, with family and friends.
It is a potent moment to take a pause. Yes, there are mounting pressures. But there are also deepening collaborative networks and evolving understandings of the imperative to do better for all people. Though we may be conditioned—and even told, perhaps explicitly—to do more faster (thank you, late-stage capitalism), it is essential for our humanity to find ways to do less. To fully inhabit our life, we must slow down and take time to listen—to intuition, to the stories our young ones want to share, to feedback, to those we serve, to the voices of those who are marginalized, to nature.
This is my invitation to myself and community as we move into fall, this season of harvesting and moving inward. Just as the plants bring their energy in and down to their roots, how might we create more space, deepening our rootedness in that which is nourishing, including rest? If we can take some space from all the outward doing, we may experience a flourishing of being. Responding from a place of presence and space, new possibilities and structures that support what we want may find the conditions needed to emerge.
Unrushed presence also nourishes community. It creates space for creative connections, for the reweaving of our community structures, for beauty and ceremony, joy and communion, music and dance. This is space for meaningful conversations, space to ask “How are you?” and lean into the response.
Not that this is easy to do. We all live and work within structures organized around maximizing productivity. Perhaps some of us are well positioned to advocate for evolving structures, but many of us are not. Nonprofits and other organizations measure themselves by their “impact”—kind of an intense word—which may force a quantitative versus a qualitative way of evaluating performance that keeps cuing us to do more and keep growing. Perhaps this reflects responsible stewardship of public funds, but it also reflects a deep-seated culture of doing more and more without incentive to pause and invest in the quality of presence.
A question those in leadership roles can ask: What is the human cost of not investing in our collective ability to take care of ourselves, to reflect and recover from our work efforts? What is the cost of front-line service and health care workers burning out and leaving their work, or feeling demoralized and unsupported? What emergent glimmers of future possibilities will never come into being if visionaries exhaust themselves before they can manifest?
This world, and this community, has abundant financial resources. Now is a beautiful moment to pause and connect. It is totally possible if we make the time to breathe it into being. We must support each other in making courageous decisions to be a little less productive. We can celebrate each other’s leadership in staying home to rest when we feel tired or ill, or in taking time to be on retreat. If you are a leader in an organization, you can support your team by offering restorative experiences (hint—don’t ask them to do it on their time off) and by calibrating expectations for productivity to what a person can do in an eight-hour work day. If you have inherited a structure that is outmoded, take the time to figure out how to evolve it. Change-making takes time, effort and, often, fundraising. We can all do our part to foster a culture of taking time and space to rest and reflect. This is essential capacity-building for the resilience and creativity that is so important now and in our future.
As in all things, we can turn to the natural world for guidance. Coyotes and foxes know the value of basking in the sunshine. Birds observe cycles of activity and rest. The natural world is constantly working to support renewal. Go outside and let your gaze rest on something green. Feel the sun or the breeze on your skin. Lay on the earth or let your feet touch the grass. Let us find our way back to our place in the natural order of things, as human beings in the most complete expression of the words. Being, human.
Anna O’Malley, M.D., is an integrative family and community medicine physician with the Coastal Health Alliance. She also directs Natura Institute for Ecology and Medicine in the Commonweal Garden.