East Matunuck State Beach, RI, a few days ago (Photo by Micah Sifry, 2022)

Today I woke up with a nasty muscle spasm behind my right shoulder. On a scale of zero to ten, the pain is a seven — just barely tolerable. I tried lying on the floor with a tennis ball underneath me to try to find the trigger point that could help the muscle release, and now I’m writing this column while on my back with my knees propped up. I have no idea why my shoulder seized up overnight. Maybe I slept hard on it. Or maybe my body is sending me a message to slow down. I’ve been trying to write a lot the last few days, in anticipation of wanting to be able to shut off the spigot entirely when my wife and I go on vacation next week.

As I get older, I’ve started to learn that pain, injury and illness are often the body’s way of talking back. Years ago, I noticed how sometimes I’d get sick while on vacation. It was as if choosing to slow the engine that keeps me working at a highly productive pace also had the effect of lowering my body’s guard against the common cold and other nuisances. I’d laugh ruefully about it, get better, and go back to my usual grind as soon as vacation was over.

Doing digital work doesn’t help. For the last year, I’ve been publishing about 5,000–6,000 words a week between what I post here on Medium and on my Substack newsletter, The Connector. On top of that, I finished the draft of a novel that’s about 107,000 words long, writing and rewriting big chunks of that total since last summer. Is that a lot compared to other working writers? I don’t know. But it does amount to a lot of time spent hunched over a computer screen with my hands torqued inward, a position that I’m sure contributes to back pain. Other time spent holding a phone in my right hand scrolling with my thumb undoubtedly also contributes to back and neck problems.

That’s also not counting time spent reading online, which also hunches our necks and, for some people, messes up healthy breathing patterns. Years ago, Linda Stone, a researcher and tech executive, gave this phenomenon a name: email apnea or screen apnea, for the tendency we have to hold our breath or breathe shallowly while reading online. It’s easy to address, but first you have to be conscious that you’re doing it. Taking breaks, or even using an app to remind you periodically to breath deeply and stretch, are vital. But those are just compensations. Those of us whose work involves writing and responding to email — a form of work that didn’t exist thirty years ago and now consumes 20–30% of an average worker’s day — are on a never-ending treadmill. You can try ignoring your inbox but that only adds to the pile you have to catch up on later. (Maybe it’s time we emulated the French and passed some laws preventing big companies from expecting employees to respond to emails after hours and on weekends?)

One way I try to take care of my physical and mental health is by practicing yoga. I’ve been fortunate to find a terrific teacher, Cass Ghiorse, who I’ve been taking regular classes with since 2016. Since the beginning of the pandemic, she’s been teaching online and so at least once or twice a week I shift into a different flow. Lately Cass has developed an expertise in breath work, so I’m also learning more about how to meditate while consciously controlling my breathing. (You can find out more about her offerings here; I highly recommend her — she welcomes students at every level and has exactly the kind of values I want in a yoga teacher who is awake to the world’s ills.) Since I spend so much of my work time at a screen, I also make time to disconnect by swimming and gardening in the summer, and by cooking fresh meals as often as I can.

Despite all of this, I rarely feel unstressed. And so every now and then my back seizes up. All of us, I think, have this regular dialogue with our bodies, between the pressures we feel we have to take on due to work or family responsibilities and the feedback we get from our muscles and immune systems. And hopefully you, dear reader, have found ways to make time to listen to your body and take care of it too.

But I also have a larger point to make about what we are going through collectively right now.

Last night, on a Zoom call with fellow members of the steering committee of a local activist group I’ve been part of since 2017, we talked, obliquely at first and then more openly, about what it’s like to be a conscious citizen today. One person said she felt she was drowning trying to read and keep up with all the emails she is getting from groups demanding urgent help: abortion access organizations, immigrant rights groups, pro-democracy groups, climate change fighters, and on and on. “It’s demoralizing!” she said. Another pressed for ideas on how we could get more of the people on our thousand-person email list to get active doing voter outreach, worrying that they weren’t showing up the way they had responded in 2018 and 2020. Another, who had put “Armageddon” on the meeting agenda, asked half in jest when we would get around to talking about that. And then her partner blurted, “I just need a vacation.”

Sustained volunteer activism is really hard. Especially when it’s done in the context of a hyper-capitalist society, where we are all embedded in racially segregated and stratified contexts that are difficult to avoid let alone dismantle, and for the most part not supported by larger social structures, either nearby ones like communal organizations or national groups with paid staff. On top of that, we are all living through the Great Post-COVID Grump, where everyone in society is crankier, ruder and more self-centered after two years of isolation and fear. (Olga Hazan wrote a great piece about this in The Atlantic in March, and she and Chris Hayes discussed the phenomenon on his podcast recently.) When you add to that the radical changes being pushed by the religious right on the rest of us via a stolen majority on the Supreme Court and the so-far feckless response of national Democratic leaders — well, it’s enough to make anyone’s back break. Metaphorically or literally.

The answer in this moment of personal and political challenge cannot be simply, “vote harder.” People in the political campaign organizing world tend to work at an inhuman pace that they’ve normalized as a way of proving their merit (in part because There also has to be a turning inward and cultivation of the practices that keep us healthy and help us keep going. For me, that’s yoga, breath work, a good book, my feet in some warm sand and a cool ocean nearby. I’m hoping that you too, dear reader, can find time to recharge and reground yourself this summer. The times demand that we step up and do more, but we can only do what we’re capable of, and that starts with taking care of ourselves too.