It's Both.

when a moment of work is also a moment of rest.

So, funny un-funny story about this post. I lost it. Inexplicably and entirely lost it. (Not my temper, not my mind, the post - although when I realized I had lost the post, I did begin to lose my temper, and then to kind of wonder if maybe I had lost my mind…)

I remember writing it. It was sitting in Drafts, waiting for the right week to schedule it, and I realized that week was coming up soon. So I visited Drafts to tidy it up and put it on the calendar - and it wasn’t there. It was, in fact, gone without a trace, and I’ll never know how it happened!

Most of the time when I lose a draft of some sort - which honestly isn’t all that often given the advances in un-do and re-cover technologies - I have that slow-motion moment when I realize my mistake just as it becomes too late to do anything about it. It’s so frustrating, of course - but the nice thing about that moment is you’ve usually just been in that document. So while there’s a panicky desperation about having to recreate it, and a pang of loss for a few inspired phrases that you’ll never perfectly recall, it’s actually still pretty fresh. After a couple of deep breaths and perhaps a mutter-y decision that you absolutely do deserve another cup of coffee now, it all begins to come back.

But I hadn’t looked at this draft in weeks. This is starting over with nothing more than a single image and the memory of the moment that this image captured. A moment when my worlds of work and delight entirely knit together and became one, a moment I was reminded of on one particular Sunday afternoon when one of my kids said…

“Mom, why are you doing laundry on Sunday? It’s supposed to be your day off.”

“Well, if I don’t do the laundry today, you won’t have the clothes you need in the morning. I need to do it - so I'll just have to do it differently.”

We all make choices, right? I mean, technically, I could literally choose just not to do the laundry (giving up). I could do the laundry while grumbling about having to do the laundry when it’s supposed to be my day of rest (martyrdom). I could do the laundry this time, but make sure everyone knows that in the future, all laundry will be done by Saturday night or it’s not getting done (control).

Or….I could choose to do the laundry on my day of rest, and I could also choose to do it differently because it was my day of rest (freedom).

I could pile my laundry into our convenient washer-dryer unit while being so super-grateful that I’m not hand-scrubbing it in the sink like I did every day for several years when we first moved onto our homestead. I could grab that dryer-warm laundry out of the machine and pile it around me on the couch to fold at my leisure while listening to the happy sounds of my family doing family things all around me. I could even, if I wanted to, put in my wired earbuds (because I have an irrational aversion to AirPods) and play some favorite music while I do it.

Suddenly, it’s not really work anymore, exactly…It’s just something I happen to be doing while I enjoy my day of rest. It can be both, and that’s okay. Because work and rest aren’t only a matter of the things that we do - but also always a matter of the ways that we do them.

And that brings me back to this one morning in early summer, the season when laundry doesn’t dry in the machine because there’s all this lovely fresh-air-and-sunshine to do the work instead. So I had carried my little laundry basket out to my little laundry line, strung beneath the towering maple trees behind our cabin, and begun my usual routine of setting the wash out. But the warm air was just so pleasant, the chattering of the birds just so cheerful, the dappled light just so delicious, that I couldn’t help myself. I ran inside to grab my camera and capture this moment when a simple chore was overflowing with contentment.

The pink shorts were the ideal vessel for dappled summer sunshine. I slid them along the line until the proportions of bright summer leaves and blue summer sky were properly aligned with all the summer feelings in my heart. I framed and adjusted and checked and realigned and shot from all the angles until it was just exactly what I had in mind. I laughed when my husband started laughing at me, and laughed some more while I explained to him why I was taking pictures of my laundry. (And honestly, this is only one of many, many times I’ve shared a story with my family about something hilarious or delightful or hilariously delightful that happened while I was hanging up the laundry!)

Was it work, or was it rest? Hanging up the laundry. Enjoying a summer day. Setting up a shot. Capturing a moment full of warm nostalgia, childhood memories, simple life, natural beauty, warm sunshine and cool breezes…

A moment when it’s okay to just be perfectly both! And honestly, wouldn’t it be better for us all if more moments were?

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