I went for a run tonight after the kids were in bed. After a brisk-for-me first mile I got sluggish, contemplated bailing out of it and walking home and slowed my pace. I ended up pushing through to my intended 5k, at a slow but decent time.
That little narrative structure is one reason I keep running. Look, a story with my favorite protagonist who overcomes the demons of sloth and boredom to reach an intrinsically meaningless but psychologically satisfying conclusion. Another reason is that it helps stabilize my moods. A third reason is that it helps me experience my body, from which I spend most of my life in a state of neglectful estrangement. I started doing this over ten years ago because I ran for a train in downtown Chicago, for less than a mile, and felt absolutely certain that I would collapse dead on the Metra if I managed not to be brought round back and put down by a merciful Amish farmer. This was after slowing to a walk for half the distance.
I almost never write or preach about my exercise routine because it’s boring.1 Running, some yoga for flexibility and back pain, some basic bodyweight stuff to get my blood pumping in the morning. Not interesting. It also feels faintly embarrassing, as if I should either be living the kind of life that keeps my body engaged and vigorous without extra attention, or I should be cultivating an ascetic disdain for anything so bourgeois. I instinctively recoil when I hear a preacher talk about going for a run. This is not the preacher’s fault.
Which brings me to my fourth reason for running, comprehending the other three: it is a handy answer to give when someone asks “What do you do for self-care?”
Moisturization and its Discontents
What is “self-care,” anyway? one may well ask. Let’s exclude for simplicity things like taking your days off, going on vacation, buying prepared food instead of cooking when you’re busy or stressed and doing things with your significant other or kids or whatever. Those are just good and sometimes necessary human things to do, needing no particular justification. Leisure and recreation don’t need or necessarily even benefit from the “self-care” label.
Instead I’m thinking of activities that have some element of conscious self-cultivation, either improving or maintaining or restoring ourselves. When I just couldn’t get myself into the office on a Monday after a brutally long Sunday and watched Metropolitan at home instead, that’s a gray area—almost intentional, a little bit constructive. I’ll set that as a lower bound.
But that leaves a lot of room for activities both pleasant and deliberate, thoughtful but focused on the well-being of the self. Exercise, health, skin care and beauty routines; cultural experiences; hobbies; mindfulness and meditation; learning or reading outside of what’s required for work or useful for passing time: all of this can serve. If you’re like me, you had some kind of reaction to some things on this list, either attraction or aversion. And maybe those reactions can be interesting (“Self-Care Activity Power Rankings” can be a future post), but they’re not what I’m trying to think through right now. For my purposes, all of these are or can be good, and aesthetic or cultural preferences are neither here nor there.
The critiques I hear and read of self-care writ large come in two general types. First, self-care is a sort of indulgence or evasion, perhaps a symptom of privilege. Obviously given a sufficiently severe crisis, one just can’t think about the toll being taken on oneself and the practices needed to protect and preserve that self. In a battlefield hospital you just work until you drop (I assume) and them’s the breaks. Many circumstances are like this for a time or a season, and many more approach it, with the overwhelming demands of the day clawing away increments of time and energy that might be used to fruitfully practice woodworking or conversational French. Life is serious and deadly and demanding, and if you have the kind of surplus that allows facials and jam nights with the guys, you’re either embarrassingly privileged, not focusing on important enough things, or both.
This is perhaps a hyperbolic way of putting it, but I think it’s a reasonable question. If people really believe we are in the midst of a civilization-ending climate crisis (or, to choose another example, that we are committing a Holocaust against the unborn), should those people not be bending every moment of available effort and attention toward addressing it? We deal in absolutes in Christianity, especially where commitment is concerned. What margin of ourselves may we hold back for ourselves in an emergency? Oh, and by the way, it’s always an emergency.
The second type of criticism is related but points in a different direction. Isn’t self-care just a coping strategy, a symptom of collective defeat, the cell-pacing of the imprisoned late capitalist subject? Build your mindfulness toolkit to manage and soothe the anxiety created by our world and function better as a worker. In this view (again probably a hyperbolic caricature by me), self-care makes enduring and negotiating your place in the world entirely your problem, perhaps assisted by employment-based wellness programs but fundamentally on you to arrange, and fundamentally ordered to the discipline and productivity of the workforce. And I’d guess that this critique applies as much to non-market domestic labor as to the employment kind (among other things, the “wine mom” stereotype is about the coping needed to do the real work of raising new humans). All things are full of weariness, the tongue cannot utter it. Three score and seven our years run, and their strength spent in toil and sorrow. Why not treat yourself?
So Should We Take Care of Ourselves?
Granting the political problems and ideological potential of self-care, it is in fact good to cultivate oneself in these ways. One of my mentors in ministry wrote a book about cultivating non-ministry gifts and interests as a way to thrive in ministry, and it’s something I think about a lot. It is, if nothing else, a key to survival. The clergy she worked with who had broken down in their work or violated ethical requirements tended, as she recounts, to be deeply estranged from themselves, both lost and broken within their vocation and lacking resources outside of it. “Cultivate those parts of you that are not nourished by your job” is something I tell every student I work with now. I imagine this advice applies to many other kinds of work.
But this only raises the larger question of work itself and the specter of burnout. We should be eager and enthusiastic to encourage each other and, if applicable, the people in our care to cultivate themselves and to love themselves in a fitting way (“you can’t love anyone too much, just in the wrong way,” I hear myself saying to those same students). Yes, leave work early and cook a new recipe or play racquetball or record your podcast on the history of the Farmer-Labor movement in the upper Midwest. We should be free and willing to urge this without caveats or hemming and hawing about the demands of work and the doom of the planet. It’s a tragedy that work destroys people in physical and spiritual ways, in the obvious and outward and in the hidden fabric of life. We never negotiated this exchange of endless work and its dubious satisfactions for maximized potential income. It was imposed on us, and the labor market hasn’t even been holding up its end.
So like everything else in this wicked world, we can’t urge even prudent and faithful responsibility to our selves without acknowledging the coercive forces in which those selves are embedded. Jon Malesic, a writer who has covered work and burnout powerfully over several years, made the case for rethinking work in the New York Times recently:
So we should look for purpose beyond our jobs and then fill work in around it. We each have limitless potential, a unique “genius,” as Henry David Thoreau called it. He believed that excessive toil had stunted the spiritual growth of the men who laid the railroad near Walden Pond, where he lived from 1845 to 1847. He saw the pride they took in their work but wrote, “I wish, as you are brothers of mine, that you could have spent your time better than digging in this dirt.”
To really do this requires something entirely different than our individual resolve to tinker with our priorities or carve out a little more time for family and recreation. It requires “[d]ignity, compassion, leisure,” as “pillars of a more humane ethos, one that acknowledges that work is essential to a functioning society but often hinders individual workers’ flourishing.” And, Jon adds, it requires “solidarity, a recognition that your good and mine are linked”:
Each of us, when we interact with people doing their jobs, has the power to make their lives miserable. If I’m overworked, I’m likely to overburden you. But the reverse is also true: Your compassion can evoke mine.
We should care for ourselves and we should not be embarrassed that we want to. But we will only be able to really care for ourselves if we look out for each other.
Appreciation: Baseball on a Fall Evening
Nothing inspires tedious-dad writing quite like baseball, so I’ll keep this short. When I went with Kid 1 to see the White Sox at the Rangers last month, we stayed to the very end of a not-very-close game and cheered for our boys as they came off the field victorious. It was my first time in that stadium and the first victory I’d seen in person this season and I was all of a sudden struck with the out-of-time feeling of it. Different place, different guys, each game its own unrepeatable self and yet the same endlessly recurring thing. “Baseball has marked the time,” James Earl Jones says in that tedious-dad monument Field of Dreams. But dammit, he’s right.
You don’t know how long a kid will play. Kid 1 has played longer and better than I ever did, growing from a little kid to a Randy Johnson-in-training. And sometimes when I’m at the park watching him I feel the concurrence of all those years and games. Some boys laughing and tumbling, growing into their limbs, between innings and then out to the bases they go, snapping the ball back and forth across the infield before the umpire calls time and the batter is up. When the light is perfect and it’s not too hot, as it finally is here in late September and October, there’s nothing more beautiful. How can we ever stop missing this?
This is the only time I can remember mentioning it, in case you’re interested. The failure to spin more pitches out of something I spend 20+ hours every month doing is notable.