It’s a bit funny how time is the one thing we always seem to want more of; yet, sometimes when we suddenly get it, we don’t know what to do with it.

The time I suddenly have on my hands is a blessing and a curse. A blessing that allows me to focus on recovering from burn out and attending to what I call the “admin” of my life — the chores, appointments, and tasks that need to get done, but that I rarely have time for during the week. A curse that undermines my ability to rest and get things done by activating my avoidant self and the critical self-talk about everything I “should” be able to do in a day. All the items that “should” be ticked off my list already.

Letting go of the “shoulds” to focus on the present helps me get to that rest and recovery. My brain knows these things. My body and my inner monologue often need some time to catch up.

Recovering my morning reflective practice has been the best gift of this time. The alarm doesn’t go off every morning, but I do get up at about the same time every day. After my daily maintenance routine, I set a timer and read for :25 minutes and then journal for :25 minutes. Right now, that means working through Brene Brown’s new book, Strong Ground. Afterwards, I focus on some projects for myself, and usually do some other reading.

Right now, all my efforts have me about to that middle, half-filled yellow silhouette in the image above. The challenge moving forward is letting go of the inner monologue that tells me what I have done isn’t enough. That I should be doing more. That I am wasting this time.

I’m not though.

As she promotes this new book, Dr. Brown talks some about the AI revolution that we are all facing in the workforce. Specifically, she brings up people in the workplace who believe that our “human-ness” will keep AI from completely taking over. That people will remain essential in the work place because of the human things we can do that AI cannot – empathy, connection, rhetorical awareness, etc. Brown points out that one problem with this thinking is that right now “we” (humans) are not very good at what makes us human. She has a point. Even a cursory glance at the headlines and happenings in the world illustrates all too well how we are failing each other.

Her observations raises other questions for me that I’ve been struggling with as I attempt to adapt to this AI revolution. What makes us human? What is work? How do we measure what is important about the work that we do? There’s no Dunning-Krueger effect here; I do not think I can answer these questions. I’m rumbling with them, though. Finishing Dr. Shannon Valor’s The AI Mirror. Returning to bell hook’s all about love, and Baudrillard’s Simulacra and Simulation.

In a quotation within a quotation within a quotation, Brown’s Strong Ground introduced me to Dr. Sara Lewis with a long passage from her book The Rise. In that book, Dr. Lewis provides a quotation from Lewis Hyde, “Work is what we do by the hour, [but labor] sets its own pace. We may get paid for it, but it’s harder to quantify. … Writing a poem, raising a child, developing a new calculus, resolving a neurosis, invention in all forms— these are labors.” This distinction between work and labor lives in me; it is the marrow of my bones. I’ve been working by the hour since well before I was sixteen and legally able to get a job.

Although the trend has been developing before, since the beginning of this year, the pace and pressure to reduce labor to quantifiable, productive work increased exponentially. The AI revolution is not the only force reshaping workplaces. My body, my brain, and my inner monologue have been calibrate for work. Work done by the hour. Work measurable by word count, check marks on the to-do list, emails sent, meetings held.

Suddenly, though, there is time to labor. Time to read and question and think and re-think. I suppose it is only natural for it to take some time for me to adapt to this pace. Perhaps a question to add to my list, “How do humans labor?” And a question to take back to the office with us, “What labor do I need to do today?”