Turning on a light
I left in a state of shock. I asked myself, “Turning on a light is considered work?”
A few weeks ago I was walking to Home Depot with my wife and I was stopped and asked by a Hasidic Jewish man to turn on a light for him in his religious meeting room. He told me in jumbled English, “it's my religion, I can't do this today - can you help?” I went inside and pushed 2 light switches on.
Leaving that situation, brought up a lifelong struggle I've had with understanding the definition and need for rest. I always needed to be doing something and felt this subtle constant pressure to plan the next thing.
You may read the word rest and not even know what it means. We often define it by more of what it's not. To me, rest is the unadulterated state of being and groundedness for an extended period. It’s both a physical and internal state. It starts with slowing down and ends with staying calm.
Trauma is the most unrealized reason for keeping us in a constant state of unrest at a foundational level.
“From a neuroscience lens, brain-imaging studies of trauma patients usually find abnormal activation of the insula. The insula integrates and interprets information from sensory organs, and transmits fight-or-flight signals to the amygdala when necessary. In people with trauma, these signals are firing all the time. It doesn’t require any conscious influence – you just constantly feel on edge, for no apparent reason. You may have a sense that something has gone wrong, or of imminent doom. These powerful feelings are generated deep inside the brain and cannot be eliminated by reason or understanding.” (Forte, 2019)
When you undergo trauma, your body holds and remembers that experience and tells your mind that it's true. You’re constantly in fight, flight, or freeze mode. While occasional heightened awareness is a biological necessity, always being in this state makes you feel like there’s always something wrong and you always have to be doing something about it.
A common example of this is a soldier returning from war who has PTSD. They often struggle with loud noises, social bonding, and how to process and handle their anger after being exposed to constant loud, chaotic environments, always on edge, and seeing fellow brothers in arms die right in from of them. Over and over.
When they’re taken out of that, their bodies and minds remember and hold all those experiences. They’ve adapted to living like that so even though their new environments don’t resemble that, certain aspects remind them of those moments at war and trigger an over-stimulated response.
On top of the trauma, other aspects of living in unrest are living in a hero culture of overworking (I like to call it earning your busyness badge), non-stop notifications, having internet access 24/7, and peer pressure to just “keep grinding” are all factors that keep us from rest. How messed up is it that we confuse rest with being idle or lazy?
We know what unrest is but usually on a larger, societal scale. Yet, everyone seems to be self-diagnosing themselves with anxiety, and "being fidgety" is a commonly used phrase for the average kid, who then gets diagnosed with having ADHD (medicine is a cure-all, right?).
“The solution of mankind’s most vexing problem will not be found in renouncing technical civilization, but in attaining some degree of independence of it.” - The Sabbath, Abraham Joshua Heschel
Why are we scared of stopping and slowing down? For me, I can say it’s:
Fear of disapproval from my boss thinking I don’t work hard enough, my wanting to feel important,
Not trusting the silence and stillness in my life
Ultimately, it's because I'm scared that I will still be of value if I didn't do anything. If I'm not always contributing and being useful then what's the point? I also used to think there were no implications for staying in a state of unrest. I wasn’t even aware I wasn’t resting.
What are the implications if we don't learn how to rest? How much longer can we go individually and collectively as a society before we all break?
When I was let go from my job during the pandemic, I found out that I became depressed and always felt tired like I was playing catch up. You can sleep for a long time but that does not mean you rest. It's like going on vacation for a week and coming back to more work and stress.
You keep remembering the emails to respond to, the compiled tasks and succumbing to what other people think are most important and need from you. You never vacationed, you just paid for a change of scenery to still worry and be anxious.
When we don’t set and manage our boundaries with work, the work subtly spills and takes over every area of our life. We identify things by their boundaries and limits. Without them, there’s no start and stop. So, all we know internally is work though we may stop working our jobs. We’re always on the clock.
This way of living prevents us from ever entering into the moment. It’s like dipping your toe in a bathtub full of water, thinking that you’ve bathed. We feel like we have to keep up online, not wanting to sit with ourselves or navigate undesired emotions.
ADHD diagnoses are at an all-time high, the Great Resignation is at the forefront of every mainline employee’s mind, and depression and anxiety have skyrocketed to new heights post-pandemic.
I’ve experienced all these repercussions on a personal level. I used to always be looking to the next thing, nothing was ever good enough. That could be better, this could be improved. I was constantly distracted by that which didn’t matter. From social media doom scrolling to being medicated for my ADHD to cycling through a litany of jobs, I was aimless and empty.
We don't have consistent, necessary breaks in our lives. When you're always on, you'll inevitably reach your breaking point. Having essential rhythms of physical and mental rest is the key to a life well-lived both in the moment and in a lifetime.
“Gallantly, ceaselessly, quietly, man must fight for inner liberty to remain independent of the enslavement of the material world. Inner liberty depends upon being exempt from the domination of things as well as from the domination of people. There are many who have acquired a high degree of political and social liberty, but only very few are not enslaved to things. This is our constant problem—how to live with people and remain free, how to live with things and remain independent.” - The Sabbath, Abraham Joshua Heschel
So how can we rest? The quickest and simplest way to do this is to have physical time on the calendar for daily breaks. That could be more eventful activities like visiting art, hanging out in the park, going on a walk, or having dinner with friends. I have a morning meditation sit, weekly yoga, and hiking (working on the dinner with friends and going on walks).
We have commoditized rest as "self-care" aka buying more things that temporarily mimic rest but bypass the actual process of realigning the rhythms of your life from stress to calm. It's still a struggle but I have tried some of these activities that bring me rest and cues that help me remember to rest and slow down when I'm going full speed ahead. By sitting still, you become still as Jim Finley says.
When we have these physical and time-based pauses in our lives, what starts as an event becomes an inner state. The ultimate truth in all this is to learn to expand our rest as an inner state (think words like groundedness and peace). It’s easy to forget that every major religion has a day of rest, talks about living a life of peace, and looks to something greater than yourself to guide you. It’s been called God, Buddha, Krishna, Muhamed, enlightenment, the universe, the greater good.
Whatever you call it and however you associate with it, remember that this ideology of rest is universally and historically entrenched into our society like a network of Redwood tree roots. This unseen anchor keeps us individually and collectively grounded in the natural rhythms of life.
So, no matter how busy or boring your life is, whether you are sitting in silence on top of a mountain or changing your screaming kid's diaper, or on back-to-back calls all day, you can learn to enter in and become rest.
Almost everything in our lives is calculated and measured. We are always looking to “optimize productivity” and be “efficient”. There is little room for serendipity and spontaneity. This makes it hard to enjoy life for what it is, not what it could be. We don’t rest to get something out of it, we rest to become something within it. It’s something that can’t be measured. That gets us out of and input equals output. Rest reminds us that it’s not what we do that matters most it’s who we are becoming.
From a mindset perspective, it’s learning that less is truly more. From a belief perspective, it’s believing in the power and value of rest as an essential way of living. From an emotional perspective, it’s setting boundaries with your job, your family and friends, and yourself to calibrate your calendar to more reflect times of rest.
It’s still a work in progress for me. My schedule is often still hurried, rushed, and overplanned. Yet, I am slowly shifting to planning more times of rest, taking more breaks during my day, and not feeling as much pressure to get things done right away, trusting the process. It’s made me more content and at peace with my life and how I live.
I’m thankful for that Rabbi asking me to turn on a light for him. I hope next time I realize that I’m the crazy one for not committing to the practice of resting, not him for staying in a state of rest.
