Activity Burnout: Why Doing Nothing Is Really Something
Today is the first day of baseball practice for the Spring season. Woo freakin' hoo. It marks the beginning of 4:30pm daily dadless dinners, hours of searching for smelly athletic cups that require ninja-skills to place into their respective underwear pockets, and eighteen million trips to the baseball field (followed by at least seventeen more on account of forgetting a glove or a bat or a child). The sky cracks open with fury, and the earth opens into the abyss of hell if I fail to bring nickels for stale bubble gum from the refreshment stand. It makes me so tired. Yesterday, I started to develop a twitch just thinking about it. My boys, for the most part, love it. Then again, they generally enjoy all of the sports, and they are always playing a sport. My beef is that participating in kids' sports these days is akin to training for the olympics in terms of time commitment. And let me tell you, exactly zero of my children is going to the olympics.
When I was a kid, I tried a little of this and a little of that in the extracurricular activities arena. Ultimately, though, I landed on the sport of doing nothing at all, not just because I was brilliant at it, but because it allowed me just to be a kid. What happened to that? Is that not a thing anymore? On the one hand, I do understand that kids--well, mine anyway--need an outlet for the energy that swells up inside them during the school hours. They are dangerous as pipe bombs without it. Sports are beneficial in that right, as well as a billion and a half others. I'm also aware that kids left to their own devices are not always going to make the best choices. For that, I am grateful that my kids want to participate in structured, supervised athletic activities. On the other hand, it isn't the worst thing to ensure them unstructured time, so they may quite literally stumble across their own release once in awhile--including mistakes and bad decisions. I have noticed that the busier my children are, the less imaginative they become. If there is even a moment of stillness, they infuse it with the inevitable "I'm bored" whine. They look to me as though I'm responsible for their entertainment, and why wouldn't I be? I am the one telling them where to be, what to do, and how fast to do it most of the time, because schedules!! While stacking our kids' calendars with countless practices and games might keep them busy and out of trouble, among a host of other undeniable benefits, I can't help but think we are not doing them any real favor in the long run. For starters, we're setting them up for early burn-out by forcing them into fierce competition at a young age. More importantly, we're teaching them that they have to be going every minute of the day, at the expense of free, quiet, or quality time. In adulthood, the drive to stay busy for the mere sake of staying busy can have dire consequences.
Standing still is something I personally hold sacred. Though I'm an introvert by nature, I do think stillness is vital for all types of people, to some degree. Without it, we lose the ability to connect with ourselves and other people in a meaningful way. Likely, that is what my newly developed eye-twitch and my beef with kids' sports these days is actually about. Without fail, every Spring our family becomes a fragmented fleet of ships passing in the night. We are ever-moving, and ever so slightly out of reach of one another. To me, while I love watching my boys play something they enjoy, forfeiting connection is a high price to pay in the name of sports and full schedules. I often battle with myself about whether the payoff is worth it. At the very least, I would like my family to be on the same boat. At best, I would like that boat to be a really nice yacht with a service crew off the coast of Fiji. Maybe it would even be okay to have a television with ESPN. Maybe. A girl can dream. In the meantime, I’ll see you on the field.
