As of publishing, it will have been 14 days since I received the fateful call from UHS. It was time to start my quarantine.
Quarantine has been a mixed bag. I’ll be honest, the first few days were almost nice. I’m an introvert, and so it was quite relaxing to be alone. I was also pretty productive the first couple of days; however, as time slipped by, I started to fall into some of my bad habits. Easy access to a comfy bed, little external structure to my day, and an absence of anyone else to encourage me to work all exacerbated my tendencies to laziness. Now, I managed to still get all my necessary homework done, but I definitely wasn’t making the best use of all this free time I had been given. More dangerous than simple laziness, I began to fall into spiritual sloth.
The distinction between laziness and sloth is often missed, but I think it’s a helpful one. Sloth is an indifference or a sorrow towards spiritual goods. There are a few ways sloth can manifest, but in my case, it took on a neglect of prayer and a lack of zeal for cultivating my spiritual life—and I certainly didn’t have the excuse that I was too busy!
Once I was able to take stock of the situation I was in, I poked around for some advice and suggestions for dealing with sloth. I’d like to share something I found.
One of the best antidotes to both sloth and laziness is structure. Quarantine is perhaps the most extreme case of unstructured free time, but, to some extent, we have that in our normal lives already. More important than just structuring one’s free time is structuring one’s prayer life. I’ve found that it’s so much easier to be sluggish in prayer, and so much easier to put it off, when I don’t have a concrete plan. Setting out expectations for yourself at the beginning of the day or the night before is a good plan for both work and prayer. It gives you something to aim at and forces you to think about what’s really practical. Another reason I often fall into sloth is that I set such high expectations for myself. Once I realize I won’t live up to them, I end up throwing away the progress that was actually possible.
In addition to a plan, starting your day with prayer is another good idea. A wise priest I know is fond of saying, “Morning prayer requires you to think about it before you go to bed.” While it takes a bit of planning to set aside time for serious time in prayer or to get to morning Mass, the little morning routines can also be a way to fend off sloth. Making prayer the absolutely first thing you do in the morning is a great way to order the rest of your day towards God. I usually mumble the Breastplate of St. Patrick as I roll out of bed and get ready in the morning.
Another thing I’ve found fruitful in fending off sloth is to cultivate habits and stick to them. In addition to the danger of trying to overdo it in prayer, there’s also the temptation for excessive novelty. Hopping around between different methods of prayer might seem like a way to keep engaged in prayer, but I’ve found that it actually just keeps me from being able to deeply enter into any one method of prayer. Whenever I need a reset because I’ve fallen away from prayer or I tried to do too many things, I go back to the basics: Daily Mass and the Rosary.
Sloth is often a temptation, especially in these odd times with online classes and few in-person events, but there’s nothing a little grace and prayer can’t fix.
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