Rest
We considered how stress and self-discipline result in growth and strength, whether that is physical, mental, emotional, or spiritual. However, an important corollary of this is that intervals of rest are needed so that we are able to recover stronger instead of ending up progressively worn down.
From nature and our own experience we can see that this rest needs to happen on several cycles. There is a daily rest (1/3 of our time is spent sleeping), a wise principle of weekly rest (one day out of seven), and a yearly rest (winter, vacations). We could even consider the wisdom of longer cycles of rest (e.g., taking sabbatical every 7 to 11 years as many universities practice for their faculty, and as Intel has done).
These principles apply not only to organic life but also to organizations. While agile principles and techniques do increase team efficiency and productivity, it is a mistake to think that agile’s goal is continuous apparent productivity. There are a number of shatterings of continuous apparent productivity that are necessary to healthy agile product development. It is important to brainstorm, learn, conduct retrospectives, take time to refactor, experiment and evaluate alternatives . . . and also to rest. Paradoxically, all of these ways of taking time to slow down often help to improve your team’s long-term productivity.
Obviously our individual daily, weekly, and annual cycles of rest help with the health of our agile team. But the team itself should also be engaging in rest. There are many possibilities here, including team outings and shared meals, team training, and planning for gap sprints or gap weeks to focus on lighthearted or experimental work (what if I rewrote this in Clojure, Haskell, or Racket). In keeping with the spirit of agile, the team should evaluate its own need for rest and plan appropriate kinds of rest.
Crossposted to full◦valence.
Nine years
From a small group beach trip nine years ago, 2009:
From 2014, now with five children:
This year’s small group beach trip:
See also: Five years
Interruption
The great thing, if one can, is to stop regarding all the unpleasant things as interruptions of one’s ‘own,’ or ‘real’ life. The truth is of course that what one calls the interruptions are precisely one’s real life—the life God is sending one day by day: what one calls one’s ‘real life’ is a phantom of one’s own imagination. — C. S. Lewis
HT: Mark Horne
See also: Christ is Lord of our time
Half full
There is a certain kind of fascination, a strictly artistic fascination, which arises from a matter being hinted at in such a way as to leave a certain tormenting uncertainty even at the end. It is well sometimes to half understand a poem in the same manner that we half understand the world. One of the deepest and strangest of all human moods is the mood which will suddenly strike us perhaps in a garden at night, or deep in sloping meadows, the feeling that every flower and leaf has just uttered something stupendously direct and important, and that we have by a prodigy of imbecility not heard or understood it. There is a certain poetic value, and that a genuine one, in this sense of having missed the full meaning of things. There is beauty, not only in wisdom, but in this dazed and dramatic ignorance. (G. K. Chesterton, Robert Browning, chapter 6)
It is good to delight in the glory of something great even if you have barely begun to understood its greatness. It is good to read out of your league.
HT: John Barach
Rules
We assume that rules will irremediably inhibit what would otherwise be the boundless and intrinsic creativity of our children, even though the scientific literature clearly indicates, first, that creativity beyond the trivial is shockingly rare and, second, that strict limitations facilitate rather than inhibit creative achievement. Belief in the purely destructive element of rules and structure is frequently conjoined with the idea that children will make good choices about when to sleep and what to eat, if their perfect natures are merely allowed to manifest themselves. These are equally ungrounded assumptions. (Jordan Peterson, 12 Rules for Life, Rule 5)
See also: Self-control
Real Presence
[At dinner] the novelist Mary McCarthy, who would later proclaim her emancipation from the church in Memories of a Catholic Girlhood, opined that she still found the symbolism of the Eucharist to be useful for her fiction, though of course she didn’t believe a word of its hocus–pocus. The ordinarily quiet and unassertive [Flannery] O’Connor—who rarely spoke to strangers unless first addressed, and then only with a shy hesitance—made a notoriously acid reply: “Well, if it’s a symbol, to hell with it.” (Flannery O’Connor: Collected Works, 977, quoted in Flannery O’Connor and the Christ–Haunted South, 23)
Memorialize
We are to remember, rather, to memorialize to and before God, the Sabbath day (Exodus 20:8ff).
We are to remember, rather, to memorialize to and before God, the body and blood of Jesus in the bread and wine of the Lord’s supper (1 Corinthians 11:23ff).
Thus, weekly communion: always on the Lord’s day we cease from labor and the gathering of bread, enjoying instead the bread God provides, as a comprehensive memorial to him of Jesus’s work and rest, his provision and enthronement.
HT: Peter Leithart
Difficulty
Mark Horne writes of strength training:
The rule seems to be that your body adapts so that the most difficult thing you do eventually feels hard to do. As you age this process accelerates. When you give up an activity because it feels hard another one starts to feel hard to do. As your body loses strength you start to avoid tasks and chores that were once easier. You accumulate weakness. In the words of Seneca, “Soft living imposes on us the penalty of debility; we cease to be able to do the things we have long been grudging about doing.”
But this is true not only of your body but also your mind and will and spirit: the hardest thing you do feels hard. This leads us to several helpful insights:
First, it helps us sympathize with others who are experiencing difficulty. It is tempting to despise others who have greater difficulty with smaller challenges compared to yourself. However, this principle allows you to sympathize, since you know that difficulty is relative rather than absolute.
Second, this teaches us that contentment, peace, and joy are not primarily related to our circumstances but to our philosophy and outlook on life. Excluding obvious exceptions such as injustice and extreme hardship, this principle reveals that if you are complaining or anxious in one difficulty, you will still be complaining or anxious in other and even lighter difficulties. Therefore, your work to cultivate contentment, peace, and joy cannot wait; you must find deep roots unrelated to your circumstances. And even in cases of injustice and extreme hardship, this reveals that there is a possible path to contentment, peace, and joy even while you wait on, plead for, and pray for relief.
Third, this also indicates a way to grow in our capacity for work and difficulty. It is helpful simply to recognize that difficulty is relative, since you can cultivate gratitude that you are not experiencing greater difficulty. But this also gives you a tool to expand your capacity: you can periodically subject yourself to greater or artificial difficulty, combined with periods of rest and recovery, in order for your current difficulties to become lighter. In the physical sphere, you increase your capacity with sprint exercises, intervals, and progressive loading. Furthermore, growth in self-discipline and capacity in one sphere of life tends to have a side effect benefit across all of life. It is strangely easier to wake up early and to eat well if you are working hard at strength training; there is a kind of snowball effect to growing in health and strength and capacity.
Finally, all this applies not only to yourself but also to how you can lead others to grow in joy and capacity. As Edwin Friedman writes, “increasing one’s pain threshold for others helps them mature.”
Crossposted to full◦valence.
Affliction
Wherefore, though good and bad men suffer alike, we must not suppose that there is no difference between the men themselves, because there is no difference in what they both suffer. For even in the likeness of the sufferings, there remains an unlikeness in the sufferers; and though exposed to the same anguish, virtue and vice are not the same thing. For as the same fire causes gold to glow brightly, and chaff to smoke; and under the same flail the straw is beaten small, while the grain is cleansed; and as the lees are not mixed with the oil, though squeezed out of the vat by the same pressure, so the same violence of affliction proves, purges, clarifies the good, but damns, ruins, exterminates the wicked. And thus it is that in the same affliction the wicked detest God and blaspheme, while the good pray and praise. So material a difference does it make, not what ills are suffered, but what kind of man suffers them. For, stirred up with the same movement, mud exhales a horrible stench, and ointment emits a fragrant odor. (Augustine, Bishop of Hippo, City of God)
HT: Mark Horne
Worship is warfare (2)
Philip Sasser on worship:
In worship, we are playing with live ammunition.
Indeed:
Out of the mouth of babies and infants,
you have established strength because of your foes,
to still the enemy and the avenger. (Psalm 8:2)
and they said to him, “Do you hear what these are saying?” And Jesus said to them, “Yes; have you never read, “‘Out of the mouth of infants and nursing babies you have prepared praise’?” (Matthew 21:16)
See also: Worship is warfare
I gotta have my orange juice. 