When you rest, are you really resting? Are you allowing your body to re-nourish itself on its own timeline? Are you resting just to rest, or are you resting as a means to do more? Are you soaking in the feeling of letting your body be meant for less? Do you really feel how rest transforms you, and could you put it into words? Where do you notice a tenseness and reluctance to relax in your body?
I ask these questions because I believe we have a duty to one another to improve and relearn what it is to rest. We live in a world where it’s taught that productivity is paramount – and that rest gets us to a place where we can continue to be prolific in a capitalist society. But I’ve found this is a catch-22 because rest is not restful if it’s a means to an end.
Throughout the ongoing pandemic, I’ve noticed the notion of rest becoming more and more superficial. Lunchtime walks. Five-minute stretches before two-hour-long zoom meetings. Setting alarms to remind yourself to unclench your jaw. While these things can help soothe the tensions we accumulate in our bodies and minds, they ultimately serve cursory purposes.
When I was in college, I worked at an on-campus deli where we had a self-service soup station with big pots of soup and to-go containers. When the soups got low and formed a congealed layer on the top, management instructed us to add a cup of water and skim off the congealed top coating (yeah, it was gross). You can imagine, throughout the day, that the more we did this, the worse the soup would taste and the less nourishing it would become. It was never horrible, but what was once a hearty minestrone essentially became water with a hint of vegetable flavor. I know it’s a strange analogy, but sometimes when I’m “resting” just enough to where I can squeeze out a few additional hours of productivity, it feels like scraping off those thin layers of congealed soup gunk to achieve the barest of minimums.
I don’t have any great answers or solutions to this paradox, and I apologize if you got this far expecting to find ✨ the answer ✨. That said, I can offer a simple reminder to be wary of the wolves in sheep’s clothing – the false promises of rest that are just adding tap water to a once-hearty soup. If your body feels worn or drained and fatigued, try to listen and find out what you really need and want. Then, transform how you think about giving yourself the essential sustenance of rest, and rest for rest’s sake, not as a means to do more.
A fitting, fun fact – I was fired from that job in college specifically because I told fellow students not to buy the soup after 12 PM.
🎶 Volume #3
For each issue, I include three songs I’m into lately. Here’s the issue #3 round-up:
Wildfires by SAULT
we fell in love in october by girl in red
My Sweet Lord by George Harrison
⏯ Get the playlist on Spotify