Opinion: The surprising antidote to burnout

I know they say April is the cruelest month, especially in the northern hemisphere. But honestly, May, just before the end of the school year in the United States, it seems to be quite complicated too. Why is everything in the planet earth needs to be solved now?

Recently, when I thought I was too busy to take on any other task, I remembered that I had offered to spend a whole day at my son’s school to teach some poems to the sixth grade class and then to take a bunch of third graders out weeding and prepare land for a community garden.

Oh yes, and after that, I was supposed to host the troop of our daughter’s Girl Scouts to eat pizza around a bonfire in the backyard, as all campsites in the our neighborhood were drenched in the devastating California winter storm.

I’ll be honest: when facing these commitments shining in the electronic eye of my phone’s calendar, I wasn’t happy. I saw no time to rest. None of these promises of how my time would be engulfed seemed to offer a chance to read, breeze or simply get the answer my emails in peace. None seemed to offer time for the cocktail I wanted to toast with my partner.

Is this serious? Then I thought:

“Tess, why do you keep doing this to yourself?

I’m sure many of you can identify with the flood of deadlines to meet this month. mine include registering for a scholarship application on a portal that looks like designed by a malevolent god who doesn’t want to grant money, to anyone, ever.

Another thing: my mother and my daughter have already gone through some mishaps in terms of health, and we had days sucked by the tiresome adversities of the health system of the States United.

Anyone who has spent a day multitasking while listening to music from the waiting room of an endocrinologist knows what I mean when I ask: are you sure you want to spend the weekend whole doing volunteer work?

It’s certainly okay to say no. I was raised by a generation of women who read the book “meditations for women who do too much”. I’m sure there are still meditations on that classic hold true for many of us today.

Volunteering in the community yet it’s a lot of work female – organize the parent meeting! Take care of the exhibition Art! The youth group! The Sunday school! Bake a cake! Save the whales and the world while you’re at it! I just edit a book about gardening, which I love, but, guys, there’s days I don’t want to care in more anything. after feeling overwhelmed by the pandemic years, I get goosebumps from any “more” in my life.

But the truth, and I know it, is that caring is good. A community feels good. Activism is good. Planting is good. Before the pandemic, when I was used to organizing events for an institution for homeless people, I had a script ready to turn from sadness to fury I feel about some situations in satisfaction.

I had a shoulder I could lean on, I could face it my pain and then start over. I do not know where you live, but where I live many fences and walls have fallen and many spaces need care.

When I sink below first degree of exhaustion, when that urge arrives to get out of tune, I realize that part of the work that need to do translates into simply supporting a pillar needed to have hope or a sense of community.

I’m so glad I didn’t cancel anything. Let it be recorded: I’m so busy now. What’s more, the long day when it was all going to happen was fabulous. The sixth graders were a bit wary but insightful.

The third-year students tore up the weeds and harvested wild fennel from the garden, preparing it to bear the first tomatoes on this land.

The Girl Scouts ate pizza, lit a fire and sang several silly songs: one about black socks that never stay dirty ones, one about the great old Duke of York and one about a man named Joe who works in a factory buttons.

The Girl Scouts, now 7 years old, were rudely torn away from many other mortals at the age of 4, when the pandemic started. They are excited to be in a group. They laugh a lot. They learned to light matches – some had never even tried.

“Poems are just imaginary journeys, aren’t they?” a sixth grade boy while we were reading the poem from “A Ilha of the Lake of Innisfree”, by WB Yeats. In it, the Irish poet imagine leaving to live alone on an island between “the rumor of the bees”.

But then somehow, at the end of the poem, he remains in the city, now altered by his imagination.

I love this poem because you can travel to a cabin of the very peaceful island that Yeats builds in words so much how much does he actually build, actually going there – a place which is restorative because it suggests possibility rather than offers completeness.

I value solitude. But I appreciate the possibility, too. To the times we go out and work in community because we want alter and renew our sense of what is possible. Thought about how, when working in a garden, spending a day with children, sing with friends around the fire while real moments and experienced, are also a journey that can change us, making us imagine a different future.

When we volunteer or work with others, we change our orientation, back towards ourselves, towards turn to others, to our way in the world, even that just for a few hours.

In a world that has been deeply restless, in which the moods are shaken with often, we build spaces where we can, for a little while, time, live in deeper fellowship with one another. In the clearing, we are the ones singing.

One of the worst parts of the pandemic was that it took me, for one time, of some of the activist practices that are my mainstay.

I don’t think I’m alone in needing to rebuild community. And community, of course, is a practice, not a thing.

This year, I’m still finding my way back to this job. I think of those hours in gardens and schools as offerings, not only for the world as it is, but for the world that I I would like duty.

My little journey helped me. Last year, the author Laura Vanderkam wrote in the “New York Times” what to abandon everything is not the answer to burnout or burnout. She recommended instead a change, a reorientation, a deliberate practice of meaningful action.

I agree. Returning to my desk, after maybe 36 hours away, the ruthless portal for applying for such a scholarship seemed less tenebrous, the request itself less complicated, the several burdens a little lighter.

I had not run away a hut on an island, but there was a bunch of fennel wild in a bowl, a little campfire smell in the my shirt, some music playing in my head.

Editor’s Note: tess taylor is the author of five collections of poetry, including “Work & Days” and “Rift Zone” (unedited in Brazil). She will launch the anthology “Leaning Toward Light: poems for Gardens & the Hands That Tend Them” In August. To the opinions expressed in this text are hers.