No Electricity Day -- Why, Exactly?

 

When my siblings and I were between about 8 and 13 years old, our Dad started to implement some unusual lifestyle ideas that interested him. Since we were still kids living with our parents, it was not so likely that we would push back much. Or we picked our battles, and this wasn’t one that we decided to fight. He must have made it sound fun. He was a persuasive person when he thought something sounded fun.

Sugar rationing.  At some point our parents decided that Charles was eating way too much honey. That was the only sweetener we had in the house, besides sorghum.  So they decided to issue each of us our own pound of honey at the beginning of the month. It was ours to eat however we wanted, but we wouldn’t get more until the next month.  This was truly an exercise in watching how differently each of us dealt with scarcity.  Charles ate his up quickly and just lived without it. The rest of us rationed our honey and had some left at the end of the month. Dad had one use for his honey – he used a quarter teaspoon every morning in his instant coffee.  Charles was a big consumer of peanut butter and honey and raisin sandwiches.

We had No Electricity Day and No Vehicle Day and Raw Foods Day. I am pretty sure that the days of specific types of deprivation did not all fall in the same week – we would do six weeks of one and then switch to another (this memory is vague).It feels like they always fell on a Tuesday or a Wednesday. Certainly Raw Foods Day was on a Tuesday, and that one lasted the longest. No Vehicle Day was a flash in the pan. There weren’t many weeks that we could manage that one. Maybe that one was only for winter.

Raw Foods Day was a whole day, every week, of eating nothing cooked. We had raw granola, orange juice, raw milk, cole slaw, milk shakes with raw eggs, nuts, fruit, other salads.  It seems like this special tradition went on for a really long time, and when I went to Oberlin, I kept it up and shared the weekly practice with roommates and fellow co-opers. 

I do remember being shocked when one of the other farmers who lived in the cottage next door put her foot down and refused to participate in No Electricity Day. As I say, it hadn’t occurred to us that we could say no, and I think we even judged her for not doing it.  She said it was stupid and she didn’t see why her family should have to do it just because Dad said so. (She was not wrong.) As I recall, they turned on the lights and went on about their normal business.

When we did ask Dad why we were doing these feats of deprivation, he said it was good training. It was good for us to know that we could live without certain things. Some day we might need to find ways to survive without something that seemed so essential – like electricity or a car or sugar or cooking. He liked the exercise of it, finding creative ways to do without, one day at a time, not every day.

As it turned out, he was tragically prescient. He was the first one who had to learn to live without things that seemed essential and dependable. He is the one who got a mysterious respiratory illness and found himself suddenly a patient without a diagnosis for months. And then when he did finally learn what was wrong, nothing was ever the same again. And it is possible that he was more ready than he might have been, having practiced these self-imposed disciplines. He used to try to imagine life without ice cream. Now he was living without reliable taste buds, without good sleep, without an appetite.

It is not clear that it is important to have practice living without things. But practice does make it possible that you will not feel so sad about the deprivation if it occurs. You will take it in stride, like people in other cultures and economic situations do, not always by choice. We who live with so many resources, we may need to be ready for having much less.  We also may not have a choice.

Of course, any observant Jew would immediately recognize the idea of Shabbat in these practices. The idea of changing your patterns, deliberately, in order to allow other creative and meaningful qualities of life to emerge. That's nothing new. But most of us don't actually do that, most of us are not that rigorous about our observance of any rituals that force us to do without.

As an immediate and overwhelming example – the pandemic has been hard on everyone, for myriad reasons, and we have learned to live without so much.  Now we have No Theater Day, and No Restaurant Day, and No Hugging Day – all on the same day, every day.  Those who are fortunate enough to have good alternatives to all these losses, we are the ones who are not suffering as much. It does seem like the people who have changed their expectations, not spending so much thought on what is lost, those are the people who are weathering this with the least pain (not thinking about the sick and dying people, or the ones who don’t have work or food– that pain is not creatively avoidable). 

I am pretty sure that there is no actual relationship between the skills learned from Raw Foods Day and coping with the deprivations of COVID – that’s too big a leap. But I do think that the practice we had in our family, learning to live without, was a useful lesson that stayed with us.  We didn’t fully understand the lesson but that is so often true in moment.  There is much to be said for all kinds of resilience.