I know I've written before about how unstructured days can be very productive, particularly from a homeschooling standpoint. I still believe this to be true, and it’s one of the things I really love and appreciate about home education. But I am the product of traditional schooling, and a post-school nine-to-five mentality. I still struggle with scheduling and find that too many unstructured days, at least for me, can be deleterious to my emotional health. Yes, it's true. Note that I'm speaking for myself here. I'm not attempting to make a broad statement that I find relevant for everyone. I get depressed and even moody when I have loads of open time laid out before me. But I don’t mean to suggest that over-scheduling is the answer either. It requires more of a shift in paradigm—a redefining of purpose. At times it’s almost as if I’m waiting for someone more knowledgeable than myself to come in and give me a task to fulfill. This reminds me of that line from the film adaptation of Sense and Sensibility, when Colonel Brandon implores, “Give me an occupation, Miss Dashwood, or I shall run mad.” Yeah, that’s not too far off from the truth. I sometimes think it’s a remnant side effect of having been traditionally schooled my whole life. At school, I was given an assignment, and my task was to complete it. There was nothing to puzzle out for myself there. My purpose was clear. It was to impress my teacher and please my parents. And I did it consistently all school year long, every year for fifteen years. I kept busy, then came the first day of summer vacation, and I didn’t know what to do with myself. I went from super structured days, to nothing. It became an annual withdrawal ritual. These periods were almost always followed by intensive bouts of depressive frustration.
I think that as a child, I experienced this sort of thing more often than my own children ever have. Going from periods of highly structured time to highly unstructured time was the norm for me. My parents couldn't afford summer camps, so they were unable to recreate the same level of structure and activity I'd get accustomed to every year at school. There were no activities, or family vacations (other than two vacations to Florida when I was in my teens). The beginning of every summer was met with this seasonal bout of frustration. And by the time I had gotten past the frustration, and had regained a sense of purpose, one I had come up with all on my own, without the framework of school to guide me, it was already time to return to school in the fall. Then another period of re-assimilation would ensue, also often met with the same sort of infernal depressive frustration, but in reverse. As weird as it sounds, I think that after so many years, I've been inexorably programmed to still go through these phases every year. I find myself in the same predicament at the start of every summer, and then again at the start of every fall. Weird indeed, and I've tried to explain this phenomenon year after year, and this is all I can come up with. Only now, it’s more like a phantom frustration, as there’s really no “structure” from which to detox, or re-assimilate. Our levels of structure don’t fluctuate so greatly as to warrant any of it, so it’s all especially odd. Some people get seasonal depression. I get end-of-school-year and back-to-school depressive episodes. Again, it doesn’t make sense. I’ve been out of school for eighteen years! But old habits die hard.
I have noticed that a lot of parents face this "how-to-keep-the-kids-busy" dilemma at the beginning of every summer. Camp is still an option for those who can afford it, but if not, as was the case with me, the kids will be left to their own devices, and that's not necessarily a bad thing. I think we’re just programmed to believe that we must stay super busy and super scheduled to be happy, and we've carried this over to our children. Some of us even mistake “busy-ness” with purpose. But they are not one and the same. There are studies showing that many people die shortly after reaching retirement age. Perhaps to several of these people, a job, or any such externally structured lifestyle that keeps them busy, is synonymous with purpose. Lose your job, and lose your purpose. How awful is that? I don’t want that for myself, or for my children. So what if you're bored for a little while. It's good practice to wade through these down times. Eventually, it will act as the impetus to try new things, and you may discover new interests that were drowned out by all of the noise of the busy-ness around you.
Come to think of it, I do believe it all comes down to noise. We're seduced by it. And there’s a lot of it out there. Lots of bells and whistles. And when the silence of down time hits, it makes us feel uncomfortable. We don’t know what to do with ourselves. My catechist, years ago, told me that when silence rears its ugly head, it’s God telling us to spend that time prayerfully contemplating our purpose in life. She didn’t suggest running out of the house, looking for external things to do to keep me busy. Those things are just band-aids. And while I'm sure she was speaking of purpose in a spiritual sense, I think what she said applies to many areas in life. But yes, ultimately, it is all spiritual. What keeps us engaged and happy often adds to our spiritual well-being, so I'm of the belief that if you can address your spiritual needs first, all else will follow. And the ability to sit in silence with yourself, is no easy task. There's sort of an ascetic quality to it, I find. It's easy for our minds to wander, and the chatter continues, only this time it's inside our heads. I know that my mind immediately goes into listing things I either need to do, or should do. It's seldom just open to the silence. Trappist monks observe long periods of silence, foregoing all idle chatter. They surely do speak, but all their speech is purposeful. Can you imagine that? Oh, to have that level of spiritual refinement. To be at peace in silence. Now that's something I'd welcome right about now.
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