Rest is Resistance
Why is it so hard to take a break?
Thank you for all of your support these past few weeks as I emerge from the blanket of fog that has been my Covid experience. Everyone encouraged me to rest, but I come from a long line of people who don’t sit down. Growing up in Minnesota, sitting still, unless you are fishing or hunting, was discouraged. If someone took a nap, it was because they were ill. Or under the age of 3.
Our bodies need downtime. We all know this. The consequences of not resting range from depression and weight gain to dementia and death. So why do we need to get sick before we start taking our rest seriously?
First, and most obviously, for many Americans whose low wages keep them toiling long hours, rest is a luxury. Second, we glamorize grind culture, heralding workers for staying just this side of burn out.
But work is not the only reason we are not resting. We have been conditioning ourselves to keep going. I watch my kids come home from school and log into their laptops to begin their homework. After a few hours of that, they take a break by scrolling through social media or catching up on the news. The difference between rest and activity has become very blurry. Between technology, artificial lights, Netflix…it’s rare to come to a full stop.
From my horizontal position on the couch, I began to investigate rest, which means I made my rest productive, harvesting insights after each nap. Do I need to be physically still for it to count as rest? Is rest the opposite of work, or is rest neutral? Does meditation count as rest? What about lying awake at 3 AM unable to sleep but not moving? Is that rest? When do we know when we’ve had enough? And, if rest is so pleasurable, why is it so challenging?
Babies know how to rest. They close their eyes and nod off whenever they want. The more a baby sleep, the more it grows. Animals know all about rest, too. The cheetah, the fastest animal on earth, spends 22 hours a day chilling out. Bears hibernate. Dolphins and sharks rest one half of their brain while the other surfaces to breathe. Ants sleep 200 times a day, one minute at a time. Desert snails can sleep up to three years at a time.
In music, rest is the absence of sound. In his seminal work, 4′33″, composer John Cage wrote a score that instructed musicians to not play their instruments for four minutes and thirty-three seconds. The result was not silence but rather a chance for listeners to tune into the sounds of the environment—the whirl of a fan, a cough, your heartbeat. Cage was inspired by Robert Rauschenberg's white paintings, canvases that appeared void of color and meaning but are rich with the reflection of light and shadows.
During my convalescence, I have learned four things about rest.
1) As with the edges of Rauschenberg's canvas and the notation of Cage's score, rest needs parameters. I am experimenting with putting rest in my calendar and then setting a timer to remind me to sit down and do nothing. My next goal is to make Saturdays an internet Sabbath and turn my screens off completely.
2) The body speaks the language of rest. The mind will keep going. Listen to your body.
3) If we don’t make time for rest, it will catch up with us, eventually.
4) Like pleasure, rest is a revolutionary act.
In China, Korea, and Japan, “Lying flat” is a nascent movement by young people who are eschewing social advancement for a more leisurely lifestyle. It’s gained enough traction that the Chinese government has begun censoring their hashtag, #TangPing. A manifesto posted on a now-deleted website stated: “I will not marry, buy a house or have children, I will not buy a bag or wear a watch. I will slack off at work ...I am a blunt sword to boycott consumerism.”
Here in the United States, The Nap Ministry founded by performance artist and spiritual director Tricia Hersey aims to liberate us from grind culture one nap at a time. “Rest is a form of resistance because it disrupts and pushes back against capitalism and white supremacy," Hersey said on For The Wild, a podcast about living in the Anthropocene. Hersey has hosted more than 50 events where people slept together in a safe space. “When people wake up,” she says, “they look so different.” The daughter of a pentecostal minister, Hersey said it reminds her of watching churchgoers receive the holy spirit.
Whether the pandemic has caused you to slow down or to speed up, I imagine you are also rethinking your relationship to rest. Perhaps it is time to not just prioritize it but to flip the script entirely and, like almost every other animal on this planet, make rest the center of our existence.
Who knows what kind of liberation might happen if we are all able to come to stillness and close our eyes until our bodies say, “I am rested.” French mystic Jean Klein calls rest “interior silence." "It is only in that place," he says, "that we can open ourselves to our true nature."
Wishing you all a well-rested week.
FROM THE INSTITUTE OF PLEASURE STUDIES
The Nap Ministry asks, “How Will You Be Useless to Capitalism Today?” and offers this lovely meditation for resting.
Napping is an art — and now a science. If you want a restorative nap, sleep later in the day. For a nap that will enhance your creativity, sleep earlier in the day. Sara Mednick is a Professor of Cognitive Science at UCI and a world expert on sleep (specifically, the role sleep plays in forming our long‑term memories and regulating our emotions). Her book, The Power of Downstate: Using Your Own Bodies Restorative Systems doesn’t suggest we curtail our ambition, but shows us how we can handle a reasonable amount of stress by replenishing ourselves on a daily basis with activities that make us feel rested.