I’m continuing my COVID supplement to The Book of Waking Up. If you’d like to support this project, signup for my Substack.

14. Living a Rule of Life (or How to Escape the Dragons)

Get out of your head.

The clarion call of the head honcho followed me yesterday. Then, another voice, this one my own:

There are dragons in your head.

Yesterday—a for swimming in existential internal chaos. In my head, there were dragons (or imps or vampires or whatever other synaptic monster my brain cooked up). I imagined lockdown timelines—two more weeks; two more months; two more years. I ran the American math—almost one million cases; over forty thousand deaths. I considered the conflagration of expectations—seniors who will not graduate; my eldes whose basketball career is evaporating before his eyes; you (and you and you) who’ve learned to use the word furlough instead of fired because the former feels more hopeful (though the latter may be the reality). Every corner of my noggin swimming in dark water and fire.

This sort of inner chaos could pull me into the old patterns of numbing, of drinking or eating or mindlessly scrolling the Twitter feed. (Don’t think I wasn’t tempted.) It could pull me into a narcotic sleep. And for a day or thirty, that might be easier. But is it any way to live?

This is where the Rule comes in. Remember the Rule? (I’ve been writing about it here and here.) Any good Rule of Life should break us out of our own inner darkness and incorporate us back into the story of true living. How? It orients us back to the age-old rhythms, rhythms that require getting out of our heads and into our bodies. Generally, those rhythms fall into four categories (according to St. Benny and his followers): prayer and meditation, work, study, and leisure.

This is not to say, of course, that living by a particular rule of life will necessarily quell the inner chaos. Some days will be worse than others, a plain fact of human existence. (See, e.g., David, Elijah, Peter, and every saint who trod this earthen sod.) But living by a rhythmic rule provides anchor points for our days, times to get out of our heads and practice actionable belief.

I’m still tinkering with my own Rule of Life, though in formulating it, I’ve come to see how I’ve lived by an implicit Rule for years. It’s different these days, though. Now, I have the opportunity to practice a more explicit Rule of Life in the lockdown community of my own family. But what does that look like? Such as my Rule is, I offer it to you (broken down by hour and example timeframe):

Hour 1: Morning Prayers with Amber; Meditation; Scripture (5:30-6:30)
Hour 2: Writing; Prepare for the day (6:30-7:30)
Hour 3-6: Work (exercise optional) (7:30-11:30)
Hour 7: Noonday Meditation; Lunch (communal if possible) (11:30-12:30)
Hours 8-11: Work (12:30-4:30)
Hour 12: Wind down work routine (4:30-5:30)
Hours 13-15: Family Time; Family prayers/meditation (exercise optional) (5:30-8:30)
Hours 16-17: Leisure with Amber; prepare for sleep (8:30-10:30)
Hours 18-24: Rest (10:30-5:30)

(If you need a resource to help lead you through the daily prayers, download the Magnificat app. It provides morning, evening, and nighttime prayers in addition to a daily meditation you can use at the noon hour.)

Use this rule as a template, if you like. Modify it. Tinker with it. Feel free to create your own, too. Whatever you do, though, create a rhythm of prayer and embodied faith. Take the time to break out of your own inner chaos and return to the central story that steels your soul’s legs. Create touchpoints of waking throughout your day in this pandemic age and see if it doesn’t provide something like stability.

To be continued…

Join me tomorrow (and for the foreseeable future) as I continue my Pandemic Supplement to The Book of Waking Up. And if you haven’t grabbed a copy of The Book of Waking Up: Experiencing the Divine Love that Reorders a Life, grab a copy. And yes, Amazon has slowed down book shipments, so considering purchasing it from Bookish, Fort Smith or grabbing a digital copy for Kindle or Nook.