Guest Blogger ~ Graveyard Shift

A friend and I were talking about my blogging awhile ago, shortly after I started. I was sharing with her how cathartic it is to be able to write it all out. I invited her to contribute a post or two or seven. And she has done just that. Here it is... enjoy!

Graveyard Shift

Just over a week ago, I was behind on a project very close to deadline, and I found myself needing to stay up late—very late—to make the required headway. Strangely enough, I was never one to pull all-nighters studying in college and had an infant who slept through the night at ten days old. But the late night has become something of a standard practice, especially with copy editing work, and I actually enjoy the quiet and focus available after the rest of the family is sound asleep. This particular time, though, late turned into early. I took two hour-long naps on the couch but otherwise stayed up all night. We happened to be visiting my parents at the time, and my mom was the first one up to find me in the clothes I had been wearing when she went to bed. I could read the concern and question in her voice as she realized I’d never turned in the night before, but I was not worried in the least. It quickly came to me that the best way to help her understand was to say, “Just think of it as working the ‘graveyard shift.’”

And so it is. Regardless of my self-identity as part of the “professional class” (my dad was an M.D.), my actual socioeconomic situation is not. The house we live in, the cars we drive, the places we shop—these things are more wholly consistent with people who routinely have graveyard shift jobs to make their lives work. (That’s not to say that ER docs never work the graveyard shift, but you know what I mean.) I’m fortunate to choose it, to have the opportunity to be home for impromptu playdough parties and trips to the park. But nonetheless, there is work that needs to be done, and sometimes I need the graveyard shift to get it done. I don’t love it, I explained to my mom, but neither do I resent it. In fact, over the months I’ve found it a unique spiritual experience that perhaps I should choose for myself even when I don’t even have work to do.

Staying up all night is obviously miserable in the aftermath; in the morning you feel dirty and strung-out and have to function somehow anyway. I do not look forward to whatever preschooler whining or defiance the day might bring in combination with being dog tired. But something about my over-tired state makes me more aware of my potential for choosing unwisely. There are always plenty of circumstances that could warrant my annoyance or even anger. But often after a late night, I find myself immersed in a good day, a calm day, almost as if the tiredness conjures up a peace and unflappability that exists entirely outside of myself.

My experience of the “graveyard shift” in many ways reminds me of the ancient Christian spiritual practice of “the watch,” a fancy way to denote staying up all night “watching” for God—listening, praying, singing, or doing other Godwardly-focused activities to keep oneself awake. Other disciplines of withdrawal (like fasting, silence, simplicity, and solitude) are similar. The goal is to foster dependence on God rather than on the things that usually keep us occupied. The temporary denial of these natural (and, incidentally, good) impulses—and the requisite hunger, exhaustion, the desire company or the longing to express yourself—remind the individual to turn to God for strength, for company, to work for and defend what is good and right and best. Ultimately, yielding these needs to God makes a person all the more joyful and appreciative of them when they are met—not simply that absence makes the heart grow fonder, but because absence proves to us that survival is not merely filling our bellies or pursuing our life goals. To survive at the deepest level is to tap into a Peace that does not require sleep, a Joy not tied to feeling happy, a Love without conditions. A shock to the system snaps us back into our proper orbit, corrects our common tendency to make ourselves the center and view life as though everything revolves around us.

And yet I cannot seem to rise above this tendency enough that I regularly perceive my need for radical reorientation. Instead I plug along at the status quo and experience my desperation only when I’ve pursued a self-centered end, like skipping lunch so I can keep working, or staying up late to watch my television pleasure du jour (currently—don’t laugh—the early seasons of Smallville). In other words, I’d make a pitiful nun. But the truth is, I’m not a nun or an ascetic: I’m a wife, a mommy, a daughter, a sister, a worker, and a friend. So I’ll take my times of refreshing and uncomfortable realization of dependence where I can get them—for now, from the graveyard shift.