Byron Katie

I confess: I like days off. For the most part, Saturdays are not days off, because the accumulated and regular tasks tend to take a largish bite out of the available time. The laundry, the dishes, vacuum cleaning and generally picking up are just the beginning. Sometimes the housecleaning extends to carpet shampooing, since the Law of Baby Feeding Gravity is in resurgence. And then there are the special efforts required on days when a cooking and baking frenzy has left the sink invisible under the overburden of assorted tools, pans, beaters, whisks, measuring devices and platters. Needless to say, I am not the original user of this type of gear: as they say in baseball, I follow in the cleanup spot.

It's not as if I'm the only one engaged in these activities: we have a shared schedule that works fairly well for the most part. Before we put this in place by consensus, there was a sense of resentment which would rise to considerable heights when a string of days went by with little evidence of cooperative effort. It's amazing how formalizing a schedule can lead to better habits while reducing excuses.

Sundays, however, are more like it. Once having freed myself from the family-based historical guilt feelings associated with failure to attend a place of worship, I found out how beautiful the seventh (or first) day of the week really can be. What a gift to be able to sit around in pyjamas (rather than office duds) and explore new worlds of sound and sight on the internet, at my own pace, without any particular objective except to find worthwhile things that have been unknown to me until that moment.

I've always felt uncomfortable using the phrase "I found ... on the internet." That's claiming too much credit. What I "found" is not a discovery so much as an uncovering of what has been there for some time.

Example: TheWork.com. Many thousands of people know of Byron Katie and her simple, four-question method that results in turning around the direction of lives.

I came upon this amazing woman and her story while watching an unrelated video on YouTube.com. There are dozens of videos of interviews and sessions that she has done over the course of 20 years or more, but the essence of her presentations is always the same. It involves identifying the issue (say, resentment over dirty dishes being left in the sink, or toys on the floor), examining how I feel about and react to that issue, and then questioning what life would be like if I did not have that feeling. The objective is to see whether or not what I am thinking is true. Katie believes that we are so attached to the truth of our own thinking and assumptions that we don't think to question them, to see what the truth really is.

The end of this process comes in the turnaround, when I see that the resentment is something that I generate, rather than the people who leave the place messy, and once I free myself of this belief, I can calmly and more appropriately deal with it. Over time, she says, this process of questioning becomes automatic whenever confusion (which is the source of suffering) occurs.

There are many others who have found their own pathways out of their suffering and have shared their experiences and ideas with the rest of us. A day off is a good time to explore them and find out which ones work for you.