GYST (Get Your Shit Together)

Art as ritual: Part 3

GYST (pronounced “jist”) stands for Get Your Shit Together.

I first heard this term from a young lady making youtube videos some years ago.

At the time, I was on my academic road and beginning my journey of “optimising” time and life (or time in life?).

Anyway, I’m not on that journey anymore because quite frankly I’m exhausted. But what has stuck with me all these years is the phrase “Get Your Shit Together” day. It has been my approach to Saturdays or Sundays since being in the conventional structure of work. These are days committed to knocking items off to-do lists (yes multiple) that build up over the week. Only after all of these things are complete, can I rest.

Again, easy to see how exhausting it is to aim for completing infinity tasks.

However, when I am going into songwriting mode for a weekend, part of my ritual is a time for GYST-ing. Operationally, this happens on a Friday afternoon, after work, where I will make sure my space is tidy and clean (relating back to earlier post Art as ritual Part 2: Space). I also meal plan for the weekend, ensuring I have some of my favourite items on hand, I grocery shop for them, I make sure loose ends are tied up re admin work (organising receipts and expenses from the week, for example), do I have bubble baths and candles? Scotch? Do I have enough dog food for the weekend? Is my laundry done? And on and on and on….

The ultimate goal of all this? It is to ensure there is NOTHING banal to take my attention off of the work for a full weekend of songwriting.

Oliver Burkeman writes about how, in preparation for the Sabbath, Jewish people who observe the full spate of laws engage in GYST-ing:

“…it was members of religious communities who first understood a crucial fact about rest, which is that it isn’t simply what occurs by default whenever you take a break from work. You need ways to make it likely that rest will actually happen….” (Oliver Burkeman, Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management For Mortals)

Continuing on this matter, Burkeman quotes writer Judith Shulevitz:

“This is why the Puritan and Jewish Sabbaths were so exactingly intentional, requiring extensive advance preparation — at the very least a scrubbed house, a full larder and a bath. The rules did not exist to torture the faithful. They were meant to communicate the insight that interrupting the ceaseless round of striving requires a surprisingly strenuous act of will, one that has to be bolstered by habit…”

For me, this preparation for the Sabbath, for rest, so you don’t have to tear toilet paper off the rolls on that day or press any elevator buttons— is akin to the preparation for honoring the time and space for creation… and this is particularly true if also engaged in structured full-time employment.

In future, this ritual of GYST-ing before songwriting may be more dynamic and changing as I move to a more flexible and flow-centric way of being in the world. But for now GYST-ing before extended periods of creating has been crucial for deep and pro-longed engagement with what Rick Rubin calls the “source”… to be discussed in the last part of my Art as ritual series.