Hello Maggie. Your Soul Food journey continues here with this week’s Friday Fix - a blog about how secular music can help us to reflect on our faith and our relationship with God.
The Small Faces – ‘Lazy Sunday’
This song is nearly 60 years old now; coming out in 1968 but it still a classic track which talks of the joy of taking time out. It starts by talking about the way that neighbours of differing generations don’t get on but then moves on to say how you can remove yourself from the conflict, and noise of everyday conflicts like this, by taking a lazy Sunday afternoon where you just let yourself be and enjoy life.
The answer to life’s problems in this song is to enjoy a lazy Sunday afternoon where you’ve “got no mind to worry” and you close your eyes and drift away. As the lyrics go on to say, “There’s no one to hear me, there’s nothing to say, and no one can stop me from feeling this way.” The message being that if you take time to slow down and nourish yourself by just being, nobody can complain about what you’re thinking as it’s just you and your thoughts which are none of anybody’s business.
We all need some time to just be, and be nourished by taking time out to slow down and tune out of the busyness. Whilst not all of us have lives where we can take a Sunday afternoon, we can all embrace this idea of taking time to just be, without demands, and to relax.
For some it will be just for a short while whilst they take a break between jobs. For others it might be in the morning when they might choose to meditate, pray or just take time with a tea or coffee as they start the day. The principles are the same: to just relax and take some time for yourself, slowing down to just be and be renewed by that relaxation.
In her book What the Most Successful People Do Before Breakfast: How to Achieve
More at Work and at Home, Laura Vanderkam takes an ancient idea of Sabbath from the Jewish and Christian faiths and updates it for the 21st Century by talking about how we might want to spend some time, possibly a day each weekend, away from our phones and other devices. She says this enables us to slow down and nourish ourselves. So this time away from devices I’d argue is another way we can slow down and nourish ourselves by taking a lazy Sunday afternoon. The idea is to do what is right for you to remove some noise, chill and recharge be it on a Sunday afternoon or at another point in the week.
