Take A Break!
Today was my mother's 60th birthday, so a couple of days ago I traveled up from London to Cottingham on the train, so I could celebrate and spend quality time with my family.
The moment I got off the train, I realised how tired I was! I could feel it in the tension around my forehead, in the sense that any kind of focused attention or concentration was going to be painful, in the growing desire to pull away into solitude to hibernate. I knew immediately that after three or so weeks of wandering, of meeting lots of people, old and new, of having lots of new experiences, I was going to need to honour my need for rest and relaxation and so spend some quality time sleeping and doing some deep-relaxation meditation.
Wise sages from time immemorial have known that the secret to a well-lived life is to find a way to integrate life's paradoxes into a mysteriously balancing whole, yin and yang, life and death, light and dark, strength and weakness, lightness and heaviness, laughter and tears. And the same applies to the balance between activity and passivity, as David Whyte highlights in this brilliant passage about restful living:
"Rest is the conversation between what we love to do and how we love to be. Rest is the essence of giving and receiving; an act of remembering, imaginatively and intellectually but also physiologically and physically. To rest is to give up on the already exhausted will as the prime motivator of endeavor, with its endless outward need to reward itself through established goals. To rest is to give up on worrying and fretting and the sense that there is something wrong with the world unless we are there to put it right; to rest is to fall back literally or figuratively from outer targets and shift the goal not to an inner static bull's eye, an imagined state of perfect stillness, but to an inner state of natural exchange.
The template of natural exchange is the breath, the autonomic giving and receiving that forms the basis and the measure of life itself. We are rested when we are a living exchange between what lies inside and what lies outside, when we are an intriguing conversation between the potential that lies in our imagination and the possibilities for making that internal image real in the world; we are rested when we let things alone and let ourselves alone, to do what we do best, breathe as the body intended us to breathe, to walk as we were meant to walk, to live with the rhythm of a house and a home, giving and taking through cooking and cleaning. When we give and take in an easy foundational way we are closest to the authentic self, and closest to that self when we are most rested. To rest is not self indulgent, to rest is to prepare to give the best of ourselves, and to perhaps, most importantly, arrive at a place where we are able to understand what we have already been given."
Living with the highs and lows of mood often labelled "bipolar" has woken me up to the vital importance of rest. One of the key lessons I have learned is that rest is not one simple thing, but a label we use for a varied range of experiences and activities, each with the ability to meet subtly different needs within us. Sometimes when I need to rest all I am needing is sleep, at other times I am needing solitude and meditation, at others a game of football, or relaxing in front of some undemanding TV, or just quality time with good friends is what I need.
When we get it wrong and use the wrong "restful" activity for the moment (e.g. socialising when we really need to be alone, or watching TV when we really need to be sleeping) we actually find ourselves more drained, even if in our minds we are telling ourselves we are resting. Learning to listen deeply to our body-minds, attuning ourselves so that we can work out exactly what we are needing in any particular moment is a highly underrated life-skill that often takes years to learn, but when mastered can transform our lives for the better!
As the theologian Walter Bruggemann highlights this in his book 'Sabbath as Resistance', rest (or 'Sabbath') is the only solid foundation for bearing good fruit in our lives:
"The fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. ... I dare to think that the 'good fruits' arise from the 'peaceableness' of Sabbath. The 'destructive fruits' ... are generated by rat-race living ... It requires Sabbath to bear the [good] fruits. Those who refuse Sabbath produce only sour grapes, the grapes of wrath and violence and envy and, finally, death. Sabbath is a refusal of the grapes of wrath, and an embrace of good fruits of life and joy, of praise and shalom."
I know that if I can take a good, skillful break over the next few days, breathing in and receiving in the ways that my body-mind needs, I will be making myself ready for the next stages of my wandering and wayfaring!