Sharks not Whales
Many of us have experienced a strange thing. After a vacation or a weekend that we intended to be refreshing and exhilarating, we’re more tired than we started. There’s a vague sense, even if we’re physically tired, that our soul is refreshed but no one would know the difference. Monday has become a symbol of tiredness. If the weekend were the most refreshing part of the week then we should be most refreshed on Monday. Why is it that we are the opposite? Why is refreshment often not refreshing?
I like to think of it like this: we see ourselves as whales, when we’re really sharks. Both whales and sharks need oxygen to survive, but they get it in very different ways.
Whales come to the ocean’s surface for air, and then dive for a long time, until they need to come up again. Swim, work, play, then come up for air. Living like a whale means that the day is a grind that needs grinding, and then you get to refresh at night by coming up for air in the comfort of your home. It’s a difficult month, but then you will come up for air over a long weekend and be okay, ready to jump back to the grind. It’s a tough year, but you get two weeks off with your family. When someone doesn’t come up for air, they get tired and it seemingly gets harder and harder to do so. A person is a whale who always thinks about the next time they can come up for air.
This sounds reasonable because it’s true of our physical bodies. You need to sleep every night, you need breaks from work to eat and rest. We need sabbaths for many reasons. But in the spiritual sense, we are at least as much like sharks as whales. Sharks get their oxygen from swimming. If they stop moving, they stop “breathing,” and thus it’s inactivity that kills a shark. Living like a shark means focusing on doing the right things, instead of focusing on getting away at the right time; it means focusing on how you move. When we stop moving towards a goal we become spiritually drained, not when we work too hard at it.
Everyone has experienced a time when the excitement of doing something made it easy to keep doing it. People play video games for hours and hours without even eating. Certain projects and fascinations can captivate us so much that we forget to sleep. Why can’t the tasks of daily life be imbued with the same rapture? Make this your goal, and you’ll always be refreshed.
If you find yourself tired all the time, consider this: maybe it’s not because you can’t come up for air. Maybe it’s because you’re not really swimming. You don’t necessarily need to relax more. It’s more likely that what you are doing isn’t meeting your spiritual needs. Live like a shark, not a whale.
