Bring Back the Sabbath

Judith Shulevitz writes with candor and insight about American's incessant drive to work and chronic inability to really rest in this article from the New York Times. Shulevitz understands the American heart; both why it can't rest and why it needs to learn to.

Here are two quotes from the article:

"In the Darwinian world of the New York 20-something, everything -- even socializing, reading or exercising -- felt like work or the pursuit of work by other means. [Workaholism] has become the norm, and the Sabbath, the one day in seven dedicated to rest by divine command, has become the holiday Americans are most likely never to take. Ours is a society that pegs status to overachievement; we can't help admiring workaholics…We relax on the run and, in rare bursts of free time, we recreate. We choose from a dizzying array of leisure options and pursue them with an exemplary degree of professionalism and perfectionism. We rush our children from activity to activity, their days a blur of tight connections.”

“We could let the world wind us up and set us to marching, like mechanical dolls that go and go until they fall over, because they don't have a mechanism that allows them to pause. But that would make us less than human. We have to remember to stop because we have to stop to remember.” – Judith Shulevitz