One of the fundamental laws of physics: objects in motion stay in motion.
Stopping is difficult. Especially when you’re not finished with the thing you were doing.
And are we ever really finished? There’s always just one more task, a next action, something new to add to the list — even as we check the boxes. One tyranny of the to-do list is that it only grows, never shrinks.
Wayne Muller writes that the wisdom of the Jewish Sabbath is that it forces us to stop working, not when we finish with our task, but when the time for Sabbath starts at sundown on Friday night.
We do not stop when we are finished… . We stop because it is time to stop….If we refuse to rest until we are finished, we will never rest until we die. Sabbath dissolves the artificial urgency of our days, because it liberates us from the need to be finished.
One of the reasons we find rest so difficult is our ego: we believe the illusion that nothing can proceed without us.
Who will respond to the emails? Who will care for the clients?
And we may have fear that we will discover we’re not as indispensable as we might have thought.
When we stop, we see that the world can go on without us just fine. We are not irreplaceable. This is humbling. And if you allow it, it can be your ticket to freedom. It is your permission to step away — for an hour, a morning, or even a full day.
The illusion of urgency is a seductive temptation that causes us to react before we have a chance to listen to what is true and aligned for us. This rush to respond creates suffering.
We respond before we are ready, leading to miscommunication and falling further away from our truth.
Muller writes that in Sabbath time we can
listen to the sound the heart makes as it speaks the quiet truth of what is needed.
In those moments of high pressure decisions, you always have a choice. You can react to the stimulus or take a pause — a Sabbath.
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