Rest is What Makes You a Person

Aug 13

Several years ago, we went through a hectic time where we managed our own businesses while raising a family. I remember thinking during this time that I stopped feeling like a human being and started feeling like a human appliance. The tasks never ended!

What I did not know then was how to rest well. I knew how to collapse. I knew how to numb myself with screen time. But I did not know how to rest in a restorative way. One of my biggest regrets as a parent is that I did not learn how to rest wisely when I was younger, or to guide my young family in that life-giving practice.

I learned through experience that rest, if it is restorative rest, is what makes you feel like a person instead of a machine.

What is the opposite of a person? A drone. A drudge. An appliance. The history of enslavement is the history of attempting to wipe out others’ personhood; to turn living human beings into machines. It is not surprising that the weekly practice of a full day of rest emerged from the story of an enslaved people, forced to make ever-increasing numbers of bricks for Pharoah’s temples. Scholar Walter Brueggeman writes that the practice of regular rest — particularly from work — breaks the hypnosis that you exist to produce, produce, produce:

Do you, when you wake up in the night, remember what you were supposed to have done, vexed that you did not meet expectations? Do you fall asleep counting bricks? Do you dream of more bricks you have to make yet, or of bricks you have made that were flawed? We dream so because we have forgotten the exodus! Well … Sabbath is the break, regular and public, that permits us to remember. (Brueggemann 2014, p 42)

Without the practice of a regular day of rest, we fall easily back into the hypnosis that we are alive to do nothing but work.

Persons of course also work; but they work better because they have time to cultivate a deep life beyond work, which in turn enlivens their work. The practice of real rest gives us perspective, resilience, and reserves to draw on.

Remind Me of What It Means to Live Like a Person?

When you are a person…

- You have agency. To live like a person rather than a machine means you reflect and make choices about how you will respond. Persons make deliberate choices about how to respond to their lives, rather than mindlessly reacting to things (in part, because you have not had any rest…!).

- You have relationships of equals in your life. You have people you choose to invest your time with, doing things you enjoy. As a person you might be reporting to someone about your work, you might be supervising someone else, raising a child, but if you are living like a person you also cultivate relationships of equals that are mutually sustaining in your life — friends, colleagues, teammates, a partner or spouse.

- You have interests of your own, things you enjoy not because they are useful or make money, but because they make you feel happy and interested when you do them.

When we rest, we give ourselves the time to do the things that grow us into persons. Rest is what makes us persons. When we rest, we get agency because we have time to reflect on our lives. When we rest, we have time to invest in our friendships, families, communities, and affiliative groups. When we rest, we have time to pursue things that we enjoy, time to practice a hobby or develop our tastes. We have time to watch the one hundred best films of all time. We have time to learn to quilt. Time to putter in the garden, maybe build a cold frame. Whatever floats your boat. (We have time to float boats, if we choose!)

What Rest Is Not: Common Misconceptions

Let’s make some distinctions between restorative rest, and common assumptions about rest.

Rest is not collapsing from exhaustion, from overwork. That is not rest. When you collapse from physical, mental, and/or emotional stress and exhaustion, that doesn’t mean you are resting: it means you have run out of gas.

If you are collapsing because you are exhausted, that is a bodily break-down, just like collapsing from hunger is also a bodily break-down. This is not restorative rest.

Rest is not numbing yourself. When you numb yourself with distractions, substances, or all of the above, this is a kind of mental collapse. Restorative rest helps you to cultivate things outside of commerce that are important to you: relationships, interests. You’re building, creating. Numbing yourself is all about escape, flooding your mind with online infinity pools or your body with ice cream, or in my case, occasionally both. (Hellooo, Netflix… hey, Ben… Jerry…)

Rest is not laziness. People who rest well and rest on purpose are often people who achieve quite a lot when they are working, even if, like Charles Darwin, they are dealing with serious health problems. Darwin’s writing sessions for On the Origin of Species started with 90 minutes of work at 8:00 a.m., a long break, and then another 90 minutes or so of writing until about noon. And that was it for the day.

Throughout this time—indeed, for the rest of his life—Darwin’s health was poor. He suffered from stomach pains, heart palpitations, severe boils, headaches, and other symptoms; the cause of his illness is unknown, but it seems to have been brought on by overwork during his London years, and it was clearly exacerbated by stress. As a result, Darwin maintained a quiet, monkish life at Down House, with his day structured around a few concentrated bursts of work, broken up by set periods of walking, napping, reading, and letter writing {…} At 10:30 Darwin returned to his study and did more work until noon or a quarter after. He considered this the end of his workday, and would often remark in a satisfied voice, “I’ve done a good day’s work.” Then he took his main walk of the day, accompanied by his beloved fox terrier, Polly. (Currey 2013, pp.195-196)

Rest is not enforced inactivity. Do you know any kid who loves the words, “Go take a nap”? Sometimes we do need extra sleep to restore ourselves, but restorative rest is more about changing the kinds of activities you engage in, not about being inactive.

Modern American ideas about rest are negative. It’s often seen as the absence of energy and activity. Restorative rest is positive and often quite active – it’s about enjoying the presence of the best things in life. Sometimes one of the best things in life is relaxing on the porch with a good book. But other times it’s building a bird house, or going out on a run with a friend.

Rest is Not Given to You. Rest is Something You Must Choose, On Purpose.

If you are waiting to rest until the world stops wanting things from you, until all the requests are met and all the work is done, you will not get any rest. (This was my mistake when I was younger: I was trying to get all the work done first. Never gonna happen.)

If you want rest, you must set time aside for rest. Taking regular time for rest is quite literally one of the ancient and universal spiritual disciplines, emerging in many traditions (Shlain 2019 p. 22-23).

Reminder: we call something a “discipline” when it is hard.

Rest does not come easily to most of us. Back to the ancient Sabbath commandment of Jewish and Christian tradition: to stop all work one day a week, paid and unpaid, for all people, and for livestock as well. (Even the land, agricultural fields and vineyards, was supposed to get a rest every seven years.) So, yeah. Taking regular rest had to be a commandment, alongside “do not murder.” And the deprivation of rest is a form of murder.

As human beings we tend to overwork ourselves and others. Stopping is hard. Brad Stulberg and Steve Magness write about the “growth equation.” The first part of the growth equation is about pushing yourself, stretching yourself. You improve your skills, strength, and focus by challenging yourself in the area you want to grow in. This is the work part, of course.

But the second half of the growth equation is rest - turning it off, taking it easy. To really develop your skills in any given pursuit, you must alternate periods of pushing yourself to your growing edge, with regular periods of rest.

However, our human instinct is to keep pushing. We have a bias toward action. It feels better to take action, to keep doing and doing, than it does to stop.

Although allowing ourselves to be stressed and doing so with a growth mindset can feel hard, it turns out that might actually be the easy part. In a paradoxical twist, the second half of the growth equation, rest, can be even harder. Ernest Hemingway said that as difficult as his blocks of writing were, it was “the wait until the next day,” when he forced himself to rest, that was hardest to get through. Or, in the words of another great author, Stephen King, “For me, not working is the real work.” (Stulberg and Magness 2017, p 75)

Rest is Something You Practice

Taking restorative rest — as opposed to collapsing or numbing myself out with distractions — is something I am still learning to do.

If you want to give yourself a fresh, decisive start, try a month of taking one day a week without any screens. Inspired by Tiffany Shlain’s book 24/6: The Power of Unplugging One Day a Week, I’ve started taking what I call “Screen-free Saturdays.”

No screens. I’m not on the computer or a tablet, I’m not watching TV, I’m not browsing my smart phone. People can reach me by phone* if there is an emergency, but I’m not scrolling through texts or checking anything online.

The first time I did that, the thought that surprised me was “Ahhhhhhhhh…. The horse is off the plow.”

Screens were starting to feel like the plow to me. That was eye-opening! I did not realize how much I associated screens with work until I spent my first Saturday away from screens. That first screen-free day felt so luxurious!

My paid work involves lots of things I do on screens, but apart from that, here is some unpaid work I free myself from, one day a week:

household admin like updating the budget, scheduling appointments, online shopping or researching
keeping up with the news (I already limit how much I engage with news sites, but a whole day off from on-screen news is really peaceful)
apps and devices telling me to update them, learn about their shiny new features, or otherwise nagging me to interrupt what I am doing and attend to them
absorbing the hubbub of strangers’ thoughts - with no screens, it’s much easier to hear my own thoughts, and the thoughts of family and friends
turning to my phone for an answer the instant I think of a question

This last —not looking things up in the moment — is a struggle for me. I love being able to look things up as soon as I think about them. (It was much harder to find things out when you had to visit a physical library.) However, searching for instant answers extinguishes taking time to wonder, or to innovate for yourself.

Screen-free Saturdays also counter the fear that I don’t have enough: enough time, but also enough information. We live in a time of deep acquisitiveness around knowledge and information. Brueggeman writes that “…an acquisitive way of life leaves one in anxiety about not yet (ever!) having enough and always needing more.” (Brueggeman 2014, p 85).

Lately I’m wondering how instant access to knowledge and others’ opinions might cut off creativity. So now, one day a week, I free myself to wonder and perhaps innovate.

I also have time for other things, because screens are not an option for me for that day:

catching up with family and friends with phone calls, with actual voices, in real time
reflecting on what’s going on in my life (I do this by journaling, but also by having a day without feeling harried by whatever’s on a screen)
drawing
going for very long walks, or even day trips
cooking things that I wouldn’t have time to make on a weeknight

If you’re not ready for a screen-free day, what are the “plows” in your life?

We all have them. What plows are you pulling? You need to rest from those. One day a week is a good rhythm for that. I invite you to try this.

What if, for one day every week, you unhitched yourself from your plow? What if you had some meals in the fridge ready to go for that day, so no one had to cook? What if you go somewhere you feel like you never have time to visit? (An art exhibit? A park? Meet an old friend for lunch?) Maybe you could be a tourist in your own town. One day off a week. No work. You’re off the plow.

No screens. Or perhaps for you, no household chores, or no yard work.

We figure out ways to prepare before we leave on trips. So yes, you might have to prepare a bit for a weekly day of rest, but I can say firsthand now that a real day of rest feels like taking like a mini-vacation every single week.

So just like you have to prepare ahead of time for a travel vacation, you have to prepare some things ahead of time to enjoy a real day of rest, a weekly mini-vacation. One day a week, make time to reconnect with your own inner voice, with your community in real time, with the natural world, with the things you love to do, and with the people you love.

Plan days of rest that you are thankful for, not only while you’re enjoying them, but when you remember them later.

References

Brueggemann, W. (2014) Sabbath as resistance: saying no to the culture of now. First edition. Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press.

Zeratsky, J. (2019) ‘Distractions are a Nuisance, but Infinity Pools are the Real Problem’, Make Time, 10 March. Available at: https://medium.com/make-time/distractions-are-a-nuisance-but-infinity-pools-are-the-real-problem-e84122d62c0c (Accessed: 13 August 2021).

Currey, M. (2013) Daily rituals: how artists work. Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

Shlain, T. (2019) 24/6: The Power of Unplugging One Day a Week. Gallery Books. Kindle Edition.

Action Bias (no date) The Decision Lab. Available at: https://thedecisionlab.com/biases/action-bias/ (Accessed: 9 August 2021)

Stulberg, B. and Magness, S. (2017) Peak performance: elevate your game, avoid burnout, and thrive with the new science of success. New York, New York: Rodale. Kindle Edition.

Paul, Jaclyn. (2018) Order from Chaos: The Everyday Grind of Staying Organized with Adult ADHD. Summit to Sea, LLC. Kindle Edition.

Notes

*I think of going screen-free as the digital version of camping. Just like it helps to have a tent and a camp stove when you spend the night under the stars, it helps to have some supplies on hand for when you go screen-free. Tiffany Shlain recommends going digital camping back to the late 1970s for a screen-free day (which she calls “Tech Shabbat”):

Since your Tech Shabbat technology will date to the disco era, that means your phone is on the wall and stuck there. If you don’t have your landline anymore, it’s time to get it back. Besides being useful when you lose your cell phone—not to mention in other actual emergencies—a landline can be very handy on Tech Shabbat. If people need to get in touch with you, if you want to call someone you miss, that’s your portal to do it. The landline is limited. It has one purpose and no dazzling distractions.
While you’re shopping in the past, get yourself a watch. Not an Apple Watch; just a watch. (Don’t go crazy on me and get a pocket watch. We’re not at the Renaissance Faire or the Steampunk Expo.) One piece of modern machinery comes in handy as you prepare: a printer. Use it the day before your screen-free day to print out schedules, maps, and any other information you’ll need. You’ll also want to print a list of your most important phone numbers: family, best friends, doctors, special-occasion takeout, skunk-removal services, etc. Keep this by your landline. I also keep a shorter version in my wallet and our kids’ backpacks, because it’s useful in a weekday emergency, or when you drop your cell phone in the toilet in the airport on your way to another country. (Yes, that happened to me.)” (Shlain 2019, pp 55-56)

Don’t want to get a landline? Here is a workaround from writer Jaclyn Paul:

Many landline telephone manufacturers like Panasonic and Vtech offer landline systems with Bluetooth technology. The system I have cost me less than $100 and includes a corded desk phone and two cordless phones. The corded base sits on my desk on the second floor of my house, and I keep cordless units on the first floor and in the basement. The base connects to my smart phone via Bluetooth. A call to my cell phone causes everything to ring in unison, just like the old days of landline phones. I can make or pick up a call from anywhere in my house, regardless of my cell phone’s actual location. In other words, my smart phone — with all its apps and distractions — can live out of sight and out of mind for the work day without severing my connections with the outside world. (Paul 2018, p. 148)

Anna Havron