I don’t always practice what I preach. I recently took on too many projects, and, after falling behind on the two crucial ones, this and A Pause for Beauty, I resolved to work harder. Two months of day-and-night work were followed by a brief illness, followed by packin’ up the truck and movin’ to Hilton Head Island.

It is completely my own drama I know. Heron Dance readers don’t want or expect me to work this hard. If anything, they expect me to live what I preach, and work at a steady, even pace with a rested, relaxed mind. That’s where the best work evolves.

So I journal about this. What is going on with me, that I feel I need to do this? Why does it keep happening? I walk on the beach past a guy sitting on a chair reading a good book. Why isn’t that guy me? Why if I’m not walking, I’m working, if I’m not working, I’m sleeping? There’s something underneath all that.

Recurring patterns that are not helpful to a good life are important to explore and try to understand in our journals. What are the common characteristics? What is the ultimate objective? Sacrifice is sometimes necessary in service of a worthy objective, but the objective has to be clearly understood, and the sacrifice appropriate. Major change, major risk, excessive work, for minor gain is an indicator of something deeper going on.

At times like this, which seem to recur every couple of years, I like to revisit my file of favorite quotes on downtime and rest.

 . . .

 Rest is not idleness, and to lie sometimes on the grass under trees on a summer's day, listening to the murmur of the water, or watching the clouds float across the sky, is by no means a waste of time.
- Sir J. Lubbock

The secret to doing good research is always to be a little underemployed. You waste years by not being able to waste hours.
      - Amos Tversky

No great work has ever been produced except after a long interval of still and musing meditation.
      - Walter Bagehot

This next one is probably my favorite:

I am almost incapable of logical thought, but I have developed techniques for keeping open the telephone line to my unconscious, in case that disorderly repository has anything to tell me.  I hear a great deal of music.  I am on friendly terms with John Barleycorn.  I take long hot baths.  I garden.  I go into retreat among the Amish.  I watch birds.  I go for long walks in the country.  And I take frequent vacations so that my brain can lie fallow -- no golf, no cocktail parties, no tennis, no bridge, no concentration, only a bicycle.
     - David Ogilvy, Confessions of an Advertising Man

...we can see the nature of the flaw which made his life ultimately tragic. His flaw was restlessness, an inborn inability to be idle. Intervals of idleness are probably essential to creative work on the highest level. Shakespeare, we are told, was habitually idle between plays. Oppenheimer was hardly ever idle.
     - Freeman Dyson in the essay “Oppenheimer” in the book From Eros to Gaia.

Six days we wrestle with the world, wringing profit from the earth; on the Sabbath we especially care for the need of eternity planted in the soul.  The world has our hands, but our soul belongs to Someone Else.  Six days we live under the tyranny of things of space; on the Sabbath we try to become attuned to holiness in time, to turn from the results to the mystery of creation; from the world of creation to the creation of the world.  Labor is a craft, but perfect rest is an art -- the result of accord in body, mind, and imagination.
      - Abraham Heschel, The Power of the Sabbath