Life Admin for Pagans
This is the first post in what I hope will be a series on... as you've probably surmised from the title...
Sometimes I feel like Pagan 101 books and articles start in the wrong place. Not on purpose, of course. They just assume their readers have a certain level of... how can I say... having your shit together. A level of having your shit together that I personally have never had. Not now, at 42 years old with a grown up job and nearly grown up kids... and definitely not when I was a teen hanging out in the New Age section of the bookstore, looking for that mysterious something.
Often the advice for new Pagans centers on setting up the nitty gritty of your practice: prayer, meditation, offerings, spells, etc. Which, makes sense! Those things are important, even foundational. They're things we need to work out how to integrate into our lives if we want to take our Paganism seriously.
But...
Here is where I personally have been on the my struggle bus for years: in order to be successful with building a solid Pagan practice, you have to have some basic life stuff at least kind of worked out - things like planning, sleep, taking care of your body, managing your stress, dealing with financial stuff... you get the idea.
Those routine, unglamorous tasks that need to be done regularly to keep life flowing along smoothly fall under the umbrella of Life Admin1, and a lot of us need help with that before we can go deeper into our Pagan practice.
It's going to be really hard to work with the cycles of the moon, for example, if they're constantly sneaking up on you. It's going to be a lot harder to get to out of town Pagan events if you are constantly overdrafting your bank account. It's impossible to meditate if you're so tired that you fall asleep 30 seconds in every time you sit down and breathe. (Yes, these are real examples from my life!)
Let me just say at the outset, the intent of this isn't to shame or blame anyone for forgetting that the Spring Equinox was 3 days ago and you didn't even light a candle. (Been there!) There's plenty of shame and blame going around already. A lot of us came to Paganism to get away from the shame and blame we found in our early religious experiences.
There are lots and LOTS of reasons why people struggle with Life Admin sorts of tasks - neurodivergence, disability, poverty, mental health problems, and many more. The biggest, most common reason is most of us simply weren't taught the Life Admin skills we need. I know I wasn't!
I'm not coming from a holier-than-though place here. I definitely have not figured all of this out. I'm not coming down from the sky like Prometheus, sharing fire with the first humans. (Didn't work out very well for him!)
As I mentioned, this kind of stuff has been a struggle for me my whole life. I'm 42 and I'm just now sort of finding my feet in the Life Admin department. And some days, I lose my footing. Things get wobbly! I am in the trenches with you, figuring things out as I go. And that's okay.
It's because of my struggle that I've been forced to learn a lot of strategies for dealing with Life Admin. The point isn't having a perfectly organized calendar. Dealing with Life Admin lets me free up time for the things that are most important to me - family, friends, fun, creativity, and walking my Pagan Path every day.
So, the idea of this series is to pass on some of the most helpful bits of what I've learned. I'll be reviewing a bunch of non-Pagan books (but from a Pagan perspective!) and sharing some of my own journey from Hot Mess Express to Hot Pagan Priestess. 😎 (Ooh, I think I just found the title of my memoir.)
Lots of smart people have been writing on Life Admin topics for years or decades and I am grateful. Some of them have really changed my life! But I don't know many (or any??) people writing about this stuff in the Pagan community, and that's where my heart is.
My plan is to write about planning, self-care, and time-management, and how we can apply those skills to create full and meaningful lives as Pagans.
If any of that sounds interesting to you, I hope you'll stick around!
Thoughts about my thoughts? I would be happy to receive them via email at knitonmycat@gmail.com, or you can find me on Discord: knitonmycat0809.
I think Life Admin is a term I learned from the brilliant KC Davis, but it also might have been Kendra Adachi, Laura Vanderkam, or someone else. I think it's in the zeitgeist now that it's okay that I don't remember the exact origin. The point is... I did not come up with this catchy way of summarizing all the unexciting, unglamorous, often invisible tasks that go into keeping a life humming along, but I'm glad someone did!↩