I recently read Rest is Resistance, by Tricia Hersey, and it has given me an interesting new perspective on the importance of rest. Hersey, a black minister, academic and artist from Chicago, draws on the experience of her enslaved ancestors as she critiques grind culture.
As slaves, people were treated like machines, deprived of the most basic human needs and expected to work at a pace defined not by human capacity but by economic greed. If a person was unable to keep the pace, they were simply discarded, either left to die, killed or sold.
Slavery was abolished in the United States in 1865 but Hersey argues that the expectation for humans to be consistently productive, to work at a pace defined not by our capacity but by economic demands, remains. Interestingly it’s not just employers that Hersey points to as setting these expectations. She argues that we have wholly internalised the idea that we must always be productive. We have entwined our self-worth with our ability to work, and have come to believe that rest or any other form of comfort must always be earned.
I find this idea fascinating because I can see evidence of it in so many areas of my own life – the guilty shadow over a relaxing Sunday, the fact that I like to go for a run on a Saturday morning so that I can feel like “I’ve done something with my day”. Even as a self-proclaimed lover of sleep, I am still clearly conditioned to see rest as something that needs to be earned if it is not to be a source of guilt.
What I find most interesting is that our minds are the gate keepers of rest, and so irrespective of how we feel, if we decide that we haven’t done enough to earn rest or it’s not convenient to rest, we simply crack the whip and push our bodies on. Of course, this might seem normal and maybe it would be if it were an occasional thing, some exceptional circumstance that asks us to go above and beyond for a particular goal. But the fact is these are not one-off things, these are everyday things – every single day people push their bodies to keep going, using caffeine or whatever other stimulant they need, so that they can keep up with the intense pace that life has taken on. And the reality is, that pace shows no signs of slowing.
So, what is the cost of living on borrowed energy? Of ignoring our bodies and pushing ourselves on? As individuals, we become increasingly disconnected from ourselves, not understanding or responding to our bodies’ needs or signals. Burnout is the perfect example, ignoring signal after signal until the body and mind simply refuse to keep going. But the consequences don’t stop there – treating ourselves like machines that need to be pushed onwards, allows us to treat others in the same way. Disconnection from ourselves ultimately leads to our being disconnected from others, not to mention the rest of the world.
It’s a simple idea but in it you can see the seeds of so many of the issues we see in the world today. By being pegged to our capacity for work, our own intrinsic value is undermined. By being disconnected from ourselves, ignoring our own needs, we lack compassion for ourselves. And if we treat ourselves in this way, how can we expect to treat others and the wider world any differently? Primo Levi, the Italian scientist, author and Auschwitz survivor, describes the danger that such ingrained convictions can have when taken “rigorously to its logical conclusion”. In his case it was the belief “that every stranger is an enemy” but where might the belief that ‘productivity is the measure of value’ take us? It’s a pretty scary thought experiment.
Hersey has a wealth of suggestions as to how we can begin to counter these beliefs in ourselves and in society. At the personal level, if you want to uncouple your worth from your economic contribution and to reconnect with the needs of your own body, then rest is a good place to start. Simply stop and allow yourself to be still and see what comes from there. And should you need it, I’ll leave with some inspiration from the author Tricia Hersey:
“You were not born to centre your entire existence on work and labour. You were born to heal, to grow, to be of service to yourself and community, to practice, to experiment, to create, to have space to dream and to connect.”
