BREATHER
A friend sent me a quote this week: “You’ve been strong all year, so don’t finish strong, finish rested.”
It’s a kind wish. But also a little challenging, confronting. Because I recognize that, if given the options of finishing strong or finishing rested, I will pick STRONG almost every time.
Maybe that’s just my own shortsightedness — the fact that immediately I read this as an either/or choice. But in my defense, the quote kind of presents it that way, too; I don’t think it’s just me.
“Give yourself a break, take it easy for a change.” Such sweet advice, I appreciate it. It sounds like something I say to others all the time.
But this week, the suggestion chafed not just against my own driving will. It also rubbed because it sounded like someone giving me magnanimous permission, granting an indulgence. Like a reward — because I’ve worked hard and been strong, now, finally, I’ve earned a rest.
And what occurred to me was that I could, instead, relate to strong and rested not as an either/or, but as two parts of a whole. Complementary aspects of our being. Essential phases of the same living process, like breathing.
Strength and rest, supporting and reinforcing each other. Our ability to power through and our capacity for relaxation, our deep need for both. Sometimes exerting, declaring, and boldly creating — and also — receiving, rejuvenating, and taking tender care of ourselves.
This is the importance of sabbaths and sabbaticals. Of a breezy Saturday — sabado, en español. All these words come from the Hebrew shavat, which literally means “to rest.”
The idea has been around for a long time — resting on the seventh day. As I considered this, I realized that I’ve always thought of the sabbath, too, as something like a reward. A quick respite after a brutal workweek. Something we might earn — a well-deserved rest. Even in the biblical creation story, the deity gets a break only after the work is done. Like accrued vacation and sick days. After putting in the hours, completing the miraculous task of infinite creation, checking off everything on our endless lists — after all that — then and only then do we get to take a load off.
Of course the work’s gotta get done. Indeed, we are here on the planet to share our gifts, talents, and passions — our strengths. We’re called to bring our hearts and minds and muscle, our time and commitment. And to a great degree, fulfillment does depend upon recognizing this creative power and exercising our most courageous care. There’s nothing wrong with being strong.
I’m just saying that it might be nice to experience that — to experience ourselves doing and being that — not instead of rest, but including plenty of rest.
Also, to rest not only after we’ve done everything, but even while we’re in the midst of everything.
Not only after the world is fixed and life is solved once and for all. Not only after we’ve given it our all and we’re so burned out and depleted that we simply can’t keep it up anymore at such a breakneck pace. But throughout the entire process. Right now.
In his lovely book of essays, Consolations, David Whyte says this:
“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 psychologically and physically. To rest is to give up the 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.”
– David Whyte, Consolations
Several parts of this I really dig. Rest as a conversation between our doing and our being. Rest as receptivity. Rest not as stillness or stasis but as an exchange of energy, a flow.
When it’s framed like that, strength and rest sound more like the same stuff. Finishing strong and finishing rested could mean exactly the same thing. The more rested, the stronger, and vice versa.
This Sunday, let’s create a space for strong rest, for rested and restful strength. We can complete this year powerfully and begin a new one with grace. Allowing the world. Allowing ourselves with it and in it. Breathe, breathers. XO, Drew
©2024 Drew Groves
