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A F's avatar

I have been thinking quite a bit of the Josef Piper piece you retweeted this week on acedia and magnanimity, and the tweet someone posted in relation to this that sloth is the “refusal to take responsibility for joy."

After years working at Fordham as a therapist and a grad student in Spirituality / Ethics, I quit to be a stay at home mom four years ago. I mourned my job for a long time, and recently I had been slipping into ennui and acedia. Rediscovering this “responsibility for joy” and magnanimity towards my vocation has been my experience during the pandemic.

Practically, the biggest thing that has changed is that I homeschool now - not distance learning, but independent homeschool. We have curated activities to the ones that truly matter. This allows our girls more time to play and more time for us to spend together as a family. We have become more intentional about relationships, now that we can’t relay on casual contact anymore. I would like this to continue.



We have also learned to take more notice of the vulnerability of others. This year the girls rode along with me when I delivered Thanksgiving baskets to people in the community, many of them elderly, who need assistance (yes, they social distanced and wore masks.) They did not do things like this in the community when they were in school all day and busy with too many activities in the evening. My children have also become more aware in general of those who are vulnerable; they see the them now, and they are getting a sense of interconnected responsibility towards them as members of society. I think that is probably one of most valuable things many of us have gotten out of this pandemic.

As we build back I want to do so carefully. While homeschooling doesn't work for everyone (and I am very aware of the struggle of working families that suffer from lack of childcare), I would love to see how education for my children can continue to work outside of the 9-3:30, 5 days a week model in a single building, and can instead become a more intentional experience of being integrated into family and community. I want to hold on to our additional family time. I want my children to continue to notice and develop sensitivity towards the vulnerability of others around us.

And from a spiritual perspective, I want to hold onto the sense of magnanimity towards our vocation and "responsibility for joy" that we have rediscovered.

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Sophia's avatar

Neither of my jobs allows for remote work just by the nature of the thing (cleaning floors in the wake of several busy bakers is not something you can do over Zoom, for example), but two things that have made this year much easier for me have been because of COVID.

At one of my jobs, part-time workers (which is almost all of us) get paid sick days if we have Covid-like symptoms. This means if we get sick, even if it's just the less deadly flu, we can stay home without worrying about our paychecks. Which means fewer sick people have been stuffing themselves with medicine and dragging themselves into work (and sharing germs with the rest of us), and so we've actually seen less sickness overall. Also, people have actually been washing their hands, people give each other personal space, we're not handling items from members of the public. . . and so, I've gone without catching an infectious disease (and I say this without exaggeration) longer than ever before in my life. If people could remember the benefits of just these two relatively simple things when the threat of death is no longer attached, the future could be noticeably better.

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