Yesterday a student stayed after class to ask me, With everything going on in the country right now, how to you pace yourself?
I’ve been asking the same question. Justice is a marathon, but when lives hang in the balance, when is it time to sprint?
Last week I attended a conference for college and university educators. On the first night, I stood ordering drinks with a woman who mentioned, “Lately I’m learning to distinguish real urgency from false urgency.”
Her words prompted me to start jotting down related quotes from across the three-day gathering. Here are a few gems I gathered.
Sometimes you just don’t get to take a break.
“I hear people saying they’re going to take a little break from the news,” one Latina woman told me. “But I don’t get to take a break from the news. I have to read the news so my friends and relatives don’t get deported.” She works in a college center with the kind of job title that is currently being renamed in response to the Trump administration Dear Colleague letter, which demands all educational programs remove race-based language or lose federal funding. Her job responsibilities lately also include disseminating information about what to do in possible ICE raids. These are not tasks that can wait.
Another man I spoke with mentioned the Eisenhower Matrix, shown below. It’s a tool to help visualize the differing responses appropriate for tasks that are urgent, important, both, or neither.
“Respond with information, not panic.”
Another faculty member offered this sentence of advice as she told about an all-campus meeting in which a colleague asked a misinformed question that implied ICE raids had already happened at their campus. By spreading exaggerated information, the question itself encouraged panic. We need carefully sourced and checked information, not inflammatory emotion without backing. As Proverbs 19:2 reads, “It is not good to have zeal without knowledge.”
Take deep courageous breaths.
Nobody can sprint forever. Humans need rhythms of rest and recalibration. As one colleague mentioned, even Jesus took retreat time and found space to “have a good cry.” We need rest habits built into our days, weeks, and seasons. Maybe it’s time to schedule a get-away retreat, set a new boundary for weekend rest, or start regular gatherings with friends.
Rest doesn’t have to be lengthy to be empowering. Monica Smith, one of the speakers at the conference, said lately she has feels her energy “is a pendulum from exhaustion to frenetic.” But she’s been trying to take “three deep courageous breaths every day.” Breathe in. Breathe out. Act in courage. Repeat.
Mix contemplative reading with informative reading
Another conference speaker, Meghan Slining, shared a simple way she trains students to find a sustainable pace: she limits her own assigned course readings and teaches contemplative reading practices. She explained how, quoting Contemplative Practices in Higher Education:
“Contemplative reading … slows down the reading. … It is a process of quiet reflection, which requires mindful attentiveness… to be fully in the moment with the text. It requires patient receptivity … allowing a more profound experience and understanding. It often involves repeated reading of one passage.”
What if we consciously chose fewer news articles, podcasts, and information sources, and instead cultivated more contemplation on those we choose?
Pause to receive beauty
The final speaker at our conference, Erin VanLaningham, invited us to pause to appreciate the work of art below. What do you notice?
Here’s what I notice: Abundance. Life. Interweaving. Connection. Flourishing.
I hope this week you find appropriate pacing, and all of these along the way.
This article is part of new series on proven, effective ways to pursue justice for the long haul. We’re going to need perseverance, strategy, accomplices, humility, tears, and a lot of other things. That’s why I decided to call this series “What we still need.” Read more posts in this series here.