Last updated on February 16, 2021
Last week I shared the first of what I think will be four blog posts on Life Design. Today I want to share another piece to this. This is something that I’ve been thinking about for several years.
As you can see from the slide above, there are two axis: Rest and Responsibility. It’s my belief that all of us were created to carry Responsibility, but I’ve learned that this Responsibility is best carried out when it’s rooted in Rest. There are four quadrants that at a particular point in time we can be living in. They depend on the amount of Rest and Responsibility that we currently have.
When we have the proper amount of Responsibility, and when it’s fueled by the proper amount of Rest, then we are Healthy. That raises the questions, “What is the proper amount of Responsibility, and what is the proper amount of Rest?” There’s not one answer for that. It’s different for every person, and it’s different during different stages of our lives. What is important is that we don’t compare ourselves to others. Our capacities are different. The key to health is that we have the proper amount on our plate. Here’s the big thing I’ve learned about this: when you’re healthy, you know it. You feel fully alive!
The problem comes when we have high Responsibility but low Rest. When this happens, stress enters the picture, and we can easily become Overwhelmed. We all know this feeling. In fact, most of us live much of our lives in this place. And our culture champions us on in this feat: “exhaustion as a status symbol”, according to Brene Brown. We proudly wear our busyness as a badge of honor, and since work isn’t relegated to an office, it’s very tough to shut things off.
Our bodies cannot seem to physiologically get off the adrenaline rush in order to slow down. We battle to make the best use of every spare minute we have. We fear how things might fall apart if we slow down or stop, so we just keep going. We end our days exhausted from the endless demands being placed on us. We know we need to rest and recharge, but who has time for that when the _________ is hanging by a thread? Soon even our “free time” becomes filled with demands as we try to squeeze more “doing” into an already overburdened life.
Peter Scazzero
I think we all know what this feels like.
What happens when there is high Rest but low Responsibility? We become Comfortable. When I left my job as a pastor, Responsibility went WAY down. I wasn’t constantly thinking about how the people I was leading were doing. It was honestly pretty amazing. I had more time on my hands, but more important, I had a mental space that I hadn’t had in a LONG time. While it was a nice change of pace, I knew that having low Responsibility was unsustainable in the long run, just as having low Rest is unsustainable in the long run. I didn’t necessarily want the same level of Responsibility that I had previously had, but there were some things I was still passionate about, and I was going to need to figure out how to still do those things.
“Bored” is the best word I could come up with for the quadrant where there is low Rest and low Responsibility. You might wonder what the difference is between here and Comfortable. The key is that the things you are doing with your downtime aren’t truly leading to Rest. What we think of as rest is often not rest at all. We have to make sure that during our downtime we are actually participating in activities that truly fill our tanks. A little bit of Netflix and social media might be helpful when resting, but too much can end up having negative consequences. The key point here is that having low Responsibility does not automatically mean that you have high Rest.
One thing I’ve learned about this is that there is a vicious cycle at play here. Think back to the last time you were truly Overwhelmed with work, or perhaps even with life itself. You felt that you were running on fumes, and you found yourself desperate for real rest. In that moment the tendency is to think you can crash for a few hours or a few days, and then go back to what you were doing before. It is very easy to simply veg out. However, that may not get you to where you need to be. A deep state of rest leads you to a place where you are no longer striving, and there’s unfortunately no button we can push that brings us to this place.
As of this moment today, I’d say I’m somewhere between the Comfortable and Healthy place. I’m definitely no longer Overwhelmed, and I’m not Bored. My level of Responsibility is not what it was three years ago, but I think it’s at a proper place. Over the past year I’ve invested in a bit of coaching, and I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about what I’m truly passionate about, and where I should invest my time. That has been fruitful work.
Pt. 1: Life Design 101
Pt. 3: Scaling vs Simplicity
Pt. 4: Life Design – a theological perspective