A Time to Reflect and a Time to Rest
I was talking about this blog during one of my classes last night. Currently, it’s both Passover and Lent and since I don’t practice either of them, I forgot about both. The conversation started started when one of my devout Jewish students mentioned he forgot it was Passover and had leavened bread, and continued with another student talking about how they forgot about Lent and ate meat on Friday (funny enough, that student was eating with me because we ran into each other at Costco and decided to shop and eat together). Hence, bringing up my religious blog that I also kind of forgot about.
As I typed that intro paragraph, it got me thinking about how both Lent and Passover are times of abstinence. For Lent, people choose a vice of some kind to give up, and for Passover leavened bread is off limits. Some devout practitioners abstain from additional items and don’t work on the first two and last two days of Passover.
I won’t pretend to be an expert on Christian or Jewish practices, but I was raised in both worlds. For Passover Seder, the meal is meant to be enjoyed while reclining. While Passover is meant to commemorate the escape from Egypt and freeing of the Jewish people, I always found it to be a time of rest (probably because my family was never the host). To me, Passover meant going to New York to see extended family, eating far too much matzo ball soup and brisket, sneaking sips of Manischewitz , trying to find the afikoman before my sister and eating this deliciously dense kosher-for-passover cake my cousins would get somewhere in the city.
All of this has me thinking about rest days, and the dreaded <<gasp>> rest week. Taking a rest week from circus is hard. We get so much out of our circus training: exercise, a reason to leave the house, a space to decompress, friends to spend time with, and so much more. But bodies are cyclical, much like Pagan traditions, and you need to take time to rest and recover in order to be at your best. I don’t believe in firmly scheduled rest weeks because bodies and circumstances are fluid and variable, but with the help of things like wearable fitness devices we can track what our bodies are tying to tell us and schedule rest accordingly. This gets trickier when you are a professional coach/performer, but also becomes more important.
To make this witchy-er and less take-a-rest-day, you could time your rest days/rest week with the cycles of the moon. Maybe you take your rest week the week of the New Moon so you have optimal stargazing. Or take up Tarot Reading and once every six weeks you schedule a night of Tarot Readings in lieu of your class so you’re still getting some income, but taking the rest you need to keep up your training.
