Relearning Rest as a Relationship, Not a Reward
This reflection is part of The Unscripted Self: Notes from the Interior, a series of honest essays about living without the script, choosing presence over performance, and staying close to what’s real.
For most of us, rest is treated like
dessert, sweet, but optional, something you only get after you've done the hard
work, after you’ve ticked off the list, answered every message, fought your
internal guilt into silence. Only then, maybe, you can collapse on the couch
and call it rest.
We don’t often talk about the fact
that many of us have internalized a kind of moral hierarchy of rest. The more
burnt out you are, the more permission you’ve earned. We’ve been conditioned to
see rest as a prize at the end of some invisible race. But real rest, deep,
unprovable, unscheduled rest isn’t about stepping off the track. It’s about
realizing you were never meant to live on one. It’s not the break from your
life but it’s the soil that sustains it.
And here’s where it gets uncomfortable. Most
of us know how to work know how to strive, but rest is a language we
forget the moment crisis subsides. When the urgency lifts, so does our
perceived right to slow down. We immediately rush to fill the space because
rest doesn’t always feel productive. It doesn’t always come with metrics or
results or visible transformation, and in a culture that has taught us to fear
invisibility, rest can feel like failure or falling behind, but tut that’s a
lie we’ve inherited.
True rest is participatory. It asks us
to be in relationship with ourselves in a way that is ongoing and nuanced. Not
every ache needs to be earned. Not every pause needs to be explained. Rest
isn’t about weakness, nor is it about indulgence. It is about rhythm, about
knowing when to lean in and when to pull back, and about trusting that
maintenance is not mediocrity.
Most of us have been taught to
associate rest with laziness, but laziness and depletion are not the same
thing. One comes from avoidance, the other from overextension, and ironically,
many of us confuse the two because we wait too long to rest, until it begins to
resemble collapse. So how do you tell the difference?
The answer isn't always clear-cut.
Sometimes rest is resistance, recovery, and reckoning. Sometimes it’s simply
the body asking for a rhythm that doesn’t match the noise outside. The truth is
you often know the difference, not with logic, but with the way your shoulders
sit when you say yes, with how quickly your breath returns to you when you let
yourself pause.
Rest is not the thing that comes after
you matter; it's the thing that reminds you that you already do. You don’t have
to be exhausted to be worthy of a break. You don’t need to wait for life to
give you permission to care for yourself. That permission was never external to
begin with.
So what would it mean to treat rest as
a relationship and not a transaction, not a bargaining chip, not a guilt-laden
reward, but a daily practice of tuning in? To relearn rest is to trust
that tending to your inner world is not a detour, to trust that presence is
progress, that silence at times can be strategy, and that sitting with yourself
doesn’t mean sitting still in life but anchoring deeply enough to move without
losing who you are.
If you’re waiting for the perfect
moment to earn rest, it may never come, but if you’re willing to step into rest
now as you are, it will meet you with wholeness.
These
are reflections from the quiet, ongoing work of staying honest with yourself.
Comments
Post a Comment