Sunday, May 8, 2016

Modest schedule change

When I decided to practice the sabbath, I put it on the traditional sabbath (Saturday) because it seemed like I might be stressed if I had to take Sunday off and had something due on Monday. As I've been in school for a year now and I've never had anything due on a Monday, I'm going to move it to the line up with the more normal Christian observance of sundown Saturday to sundown Sunday.

This is a bigger deal than it may at first seem. Not which day it falls on; that's completely arbitrary. But the sabbath itself is no small thing to me. Even if you don't buy any of the traditional Judeo-Christian canon, there's plenty of current research indicating that taking a day off a week is a really, really good idea.

As with all disciplines, one needs to use some judgement. There are going to be cases where observing the discipline is worse in every way than breaking it. However, the point of discipline is rooted in the word itself. It comes from the Latin disciplina, which is a noun that broadly encompasses the idea that in order to learn something, you have to put your mind to it. So, it's not quite a law, but it's definitely more than a suggestion.

I've found that taking a day off each week this year has been a great way to make sure that other aspects of my life, most notably the spiritual side, are not obliterated by the single-minded pursuit of a worldly goal, laudable though it may be.

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