Working with rest

Allergies zapping your energy? Or the news? Reflections on the importance of resetting our relationship with rest.

This guy - “Django the Mango” offers inspiration to all of us

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April was quite a month. I know I was not alone in feeling utterly exhausted by the time the last weeks of April rolled around. I was in a favorite coffee shop in Lewisburg, WV - The Wild Bean in line to order coffee to put some last bit of gas in a low tank before the WV Sustainable Fashion show when I saw an acquaintance from the previous year. I asked her if she was going to the fashion show and she said she had been going nonstop for weeks and needed to rest. Totally - I thought. Good for you.

As I write this - allergy season has hit hard. I am one of the unlucky few who is unable to take allergy medicine. And so I must surrender to working each day over the coming month in a dance with fatigue (for those who are lucky enough to never have experienced allergies - it is like having a bad cold for weeks on end). This year allergy season runs straight into the culmination of months of work on our local, Mercer County textile survey together with a group called Accelerate Princeton, supported by the WV Community Development HUB and the Act Now Coalition. Next week I will be presenting the results and hosting a community conversation to discuss them and talk about program options to address needs we found in the survey. Add to that the push to rush forward to help begin building these programs to support our local textile industry with a pot of money expiring in July (yes, this July). And so I am in a dance to bring my best to this work and honor my body’s need to rest while my immune system is stuck in overdrive from a collection of innocent and majestic looking oak and walnut trees on our property.

Today I am having a fleeting moment of clarity- seeing this as an opportunity to reset my relationship with rest.

My relationship with rest has been very fraught over the years. I marvel at how dysfunctional this is - given that I live, nonstop in a body that needs rest. I have been musing at this strange health sabotaging behavior of not honoring one’s body and mind’s need for rest as I watch our now 20-week-old puppy chase her tail when she gets tired. Totally, I think. That about sums it up. Instead of just laying down and resting - my baked in response has been to avoid it - write a few emails, busy about, push through it - get through whatever number of hours of work I imagine to be reasonable. Until I find myself a few days later, anxious and exhausted, lost and out of sorts. My inner compass unreadable through the fatigue.

I have often thought about the source of this dysfunction. The ways in which our society pushes us to continue churning out productivity and expending resources in service to some elite few. I think about the ways in which we are sponges for messages that support this way of working and living while degrading the wellbeing of the individual and our communities. I think about how this way of living reveals the disposability of the individual in the larger economic system - their health, their mental well-being, the health of their spirit, their creative life force. I think about this as I marvel at how much taking time to rest continues to be a challenge for me as I celebrate small wins on my way to honor my body’s need for rest.

And I am also finding something else that seems to be sacrificed - creativity. I didn’t really notice this until last weekend when I really rested as much as I needed to to recover from April and was rewarded with a lovely design idea for a fabric I purchased several months back. Not only does lack of rest get us lost in fatigue and anxiety - perhaps it steals our creativity - which we may not be aware of in the fog of fatigue that can go on for days with little bumps from emails, caffeine and Instagram messages to keep us from succumbing to our body’s need for rest.

But somehow in the last few months I’ve decided - no more! I’m not going to suck the joy and vital creative energy from my life by mindlessly running on the rat wheel our culture shepherded me onto over years of tiny messages about how people that rest are lazy, not quite as talented, smart or as hardworking as the rest of us. That the best of us should be able to function with 5 hours of sleep - or no sleep! There are all these stories about people like Steve Jobs sitting on that stool after being up all night, pitching his most brilliant idea to the world. Perhaps we can more clearly see now that the obsessive tech leaders have surely lost their inner compasses. But regardless - it is time to do away with whatever crap myth we have rattling about in our brains - making us feel not quite as good as the rest of us.

The truth of it is that our inability to rest robs us of our inner compass - our ability to make good, clear decisions that are right for us. Which as it so happens benefits the status quo - as we keep jogging on that hamster wheel. Maybe if we got enough rest we might have the clear head to get off - to realize we are being exploited.

With so much uncertainty in the world it is VITAL that we have a clear connection to our inner compass. Nobody can tell you what is right for you in this environment except for your heart and whatever life force you connect with through that strange, powerful organ. I am challenging myself this month to honor my body’s need for rest and to trust that it will all get done, eliminating as much as possible those time zapping activities that center mostly around the internet and are pretty obviously not doing anyone any good - accept for the little ego gremlin in my brain that is logging the number of hours I’ve “worked”. Let’s sub those out for rest and come back to the important work in front of us with a clear head and a strong connection to our inner compass.

The most powerful thing you may do today is to rest. The beginning of a better future starts with being clear and having access to all the God given creative energy we need to rebuild it.

Link to Invite for those of you in or around Mercer County, WV or neighboring counties - all are welcome!

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