Maybe rest isn’t a goal to strive for!

Rethinking Rest

I can turn anything into an opportunity to strive for excellence. “Work hard, play hard” is an unconscious aspiration that I recently discovered floating around my mind.  We did lots of low-key things this summer, but nothing big.  As September enters, I have been feeling regret.  And I think “Work hard, play hard” is to blame.  It makes me view rest as yet another thing that I have to strive to do big.  Like, not only do I have the pressure to do great things in my work, but now I have to do big things with my rest?  Sigh.  

Instead of looking at rest as a goal to achieve, what if it was more like… keeping the house straightened.  We all know that if we think of keeping the house straightened as a goal, we drive ourselves crazy.  Instead, we learn to straighten the house in little bits, knowing full-well that it’s going to need the same thing again in a few hours.  

In her TED talk on rest, Dr. Saundra Dalton-Smith breaks rest into 6 smaller areas.  For me, this makes it easier to push away the idea of rest as a goal.  Like straightening the house, you can scan around for which area needs a little rest attention.  Do I keep thinking about that mistake I made yesterday? I might need a bit of emotional rest.  Do I have no motivation this morning? I might need a little spiritual rest.  Do I have an eye-pressure headache this afternoon? Some sensory rest might be in order.

Of course, we’ve all had the house straightening get away from us.  Sometimes it requires a good hour to catch up, sometimes it takes many hours to reset.  Rest can be this same way.  Dr. Saundra Dalton-Smith has some deeper questions to help us when we are needing a bigger rest reset.

But this happens in real life!  We can’t get down on ourselves and revert back to thinking of “a straightened house” as a gold-metal goal that we are failing to achieve.  Reset, re-adjust, restart the straightening-up in little bits engine again.  

Rest is not a gold-metal achievement. Reset, re-adjust, restart resting-up in little bits again.

Until next time,

Laura