Part of the Rest Series.
Instead of “I’m sorry to hear that” I will say “congratulations” when someone tells me they’re quitting their job or leaving an arrangement of any kind that no longer works for them.
When somebody takes a break from work, even if their unavailability inconveniences me in some way, I say, without hesitation, “good for them”.
I want to communicate: I support you in this effort, of whatever significance it means to you, to leave society.
I’m becoming a disciple of letting go, releasing the grip, unclenching, lowering the volume, falling behind… for the moment, I am dedicated to follow the elusive divinity of rest.
In search for restfulness: some questions
This past summer I spent ten days at a cabin outside of the city. I had virtual meetings but outside of that I couldn’t get myself to do much of anything. It had been two weeks since I returned to my apartment in the city and the usual rhythm of things. I felt lost in knowing how I feel. I certainly didn’t identify as rested. “Am I broken?” was a thought that passed through.
I considered that I was working during the ten days at the cabin being a factor, but shouldn’t one be able to achieve rest while working intermittently?
What if I don’t know what feeling rested is supposed to feel like? And why do I feel disoriented in trying to rest?
Sometimes I feel I’m performing rest like I’m working. Is it recuperation if in order to participate I am actively resisting impulsive urges to pretend I’m doing something, so that I don’t feel like I’m just puttering around? Like I’m labouring to not work?
How can we know what rest is when we’ve barely had a healthy, secure relationship to it in our own lifetime, and perhaps not having ever witnessed it in adults as children, let alone known it as an acceptable behaviour in the society?
I recognize the rupture in my relationship to rest that’s been going on for over two decades. A big part of healing is repairing ruptures. What would repair mean in this relationship and what could it look like?
Identifying the rupture
Some people have told me they tense up when asked about their relationships to rest. They report feeling as though the question and its implication, assumed on their part, would point to how they “simply” need to find more balance in their lives and get more rest. Many of these people happen to work in fields tangential to urgent care; work that involves helping refugees, activism, healthcare, climate science and journalism. There’s an urgency to their work in that not doing it would have a serious consequence on people who cannot help themselves.
For them, rest often appears to be impractical, inaccessible, and even impossible. It exacerbates the fear of stopping that already permeates throughout the capitalist regime, which exploits the human tendency to self-aggrandize and self-pressure as a survival response to captivity: if I don’t do it then no one will (translate: I must get involved otherwise I’d be left out, and unworthy of community and care).
For me, the cracks of the rupture are felt everyday within my interior climate to varying degrees: some mornings are greeted with a sense of disappointment in myself for sleeping in, followed by self-shaming for not being “busy”, sprinkled in comparison to others’ careers, with a constant low hum of anxiety about the near and far future relating to workflow and money, and the occasional critical assessment of my work ethic when I’m not producing.
Looking outside and online, the worsening quality of our environment pressurizes the strain on feelings of productivity and helplessness. Systemic and collective climate issues indiscriminately overshadow any sense of purpose, hope, and dissatisfaction over individual accomplishment and ability. Many of those who have the power to move the needle are choosing to remain loyal to power in the guise of growth. Even in the face of climate destruction, our species refuses to stop. The rupture of our relationship to rest, whether we have experienced or are conscious of it or not, is a collective problem.
What do you know about rest?
In the colonial city where I’m currently living, there’s no shortage of ocean views, lattes, glasses of natural wine, manicures, weed—flavours of relaxation aids for its urbanized residents to enjoy and purchase, yet many of my friends are too tired to hang out. We work so hard to live here that we reserve the remaining energy and minutes for going inward and perhaps disappearing from ourselves so we can start again the next day. Here and today, we work to live.
I recently heard an acquaintance describe her career trajectory and that she realized there may be no more room to ascend in her current position, and she’s okay with it. She wondered aloud why we feel we must keep moving up, why can’t we be satisfied with moving horizontally. We then acknowledged the principle of capitalism and how it’s influenced our collective understanding of how a person should be. When it was time for the group to part ways, I asked for her number.
Varied narratives of rest have been witnessed, even from people I thought shared my values. They say rest is obscure, luxurious, haughty; foolish, immoral, lazy; unreachable, silly, a myth. As a young person, my family and culture gave me mixed messages about rest. It was at once necessary and limited in its form and definition. A means to working harder, producing more, doing better.
In my ruptured relationship to rest, I’m reacquainting with it. It’d been misunderstood, misrepresented, thus hidden away, silenced. Rest is elusive in my environment. I revel in seeing it casually out on the streets on the weekends when the sun is out, sometimes. Mostly I don’t notice it. I grieve that it takes mental gymnastics to get to rest. Reconnecting with it in an attempt at repair, I see, for a long time, I had mistakenly thought I knew what I was aiming for.
Naturalizing rest
In a recent session there was a discussion about finding wonders in nature, feelings of despair about capitalism, burnout, and boredom. The fear of dying was named, and an even bigger fear of in old age we will feel fine about dying because living is so subpar. The conversation yielded the question, are we bored or are we just resting?
I offered, can we get curious about rest like how we do about nature? Because nature is boring. Nothing happens but so much happens, too. “Nothing” because there isn’t meaning.
So maybe nature is boring like resting is. Nature doesn’t care because it’s not labouring to be deemed worthy. Nature lives for present and future pleasures and cycles through death, but it never fails to be alive.
Resting, then, in nature’s logic, is being alive. It’s radical acceptance. What would happen if we liberated ourselves from our anthropoid busyness and resist the insistence that meaning is immovable? Aren’t we enough now?
In another session, my client and I had a discussion connecting rest and pleasure. I thought about the acquaintance whose number I asked for. That afternoon, my brain registered pleasure in hearing her thoughts on being content with not seeking ascension in her rank. My nervous system echoed comfortably because I was in the company of another body who’d been musing on similar counterintuitive thoughts, embodying an attitude antithetical to capitalist logic. It was the feeling of being seen in identifying with something queer, something the culture vehemently hates, I imagine, out of fear.
An invitation to notice
One of the most impressionable lessons I learned in narrative therapy was that unpacking something is, yes, understanding what something is, but the negative space around it—the what-it-is-not—can be equally informative.
I know that for me rest is not work, even if I’m enjoying what I’m outputting. Rest is also not being on my phone, looking for distraction, even though it’s an efficient coping strategy. It is not rushed or urgent, nor isolating in exhaustion.
From there, it’s allowed me to notice that rest is when I am fully in and with my body. I can interact with my environment and I can also be glassy like the ocean. It’s an intuitive knowing that I’m giving myself what my body needs, whether it’s food, hearing someone’s voice, movement, or stillness. It is losing a sense of time, easy in motion as well as the absence of it.
What do you resist, come against, and what supports you in arriving at restfulness?
How do you know when you feel rested
energetically?
physically?
mentally?
spiritually?
How does rest and pleasure connect for you, if at all?
And how is your body responding to this letter?
It’s okay to be dissociated and to not know. Rest is best achieved collectively. The notion and experience of rest has been politicized and disorganized by the oppressive forces that instilled hierarchy and domination with the aim to benefit off of the exploitation and disregard of people of the global majority, animals, the general nature.
As this letter rests on the question of what would it look like to democratize rest in the colonial x capitalist culture?, I return to those* who continuously help me invite rest into my life and participate in an ongoing inquiry into this relationship I have with it—my natural state.
Thanks for reading.
*Note on my teachers:
Tricia Hersey
Rachel Cargle
Sonya Renee Taylor
Yumi Sakugawa
The Slow Factory
Jenny Ong
Jenny Odell’s How to Do Nothing
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