Productive Rest
A life well rested
The summer months move quickly, blurring life together like the paints on a watercolor. There is no distinct end to one month and start to another. Instead, they are all blended with sun kissed shoulders, hot pool days, popsicles dripping down our hands, late nights surrounded by fireflies, and the faint aroma of summer lingering on our skin. It’s in the midst of summer that I remember what rest means, true rest.
Rest does not mean the same thing that it once did. Now, rest has a bad connotation, as if the word is easily interchanged with laziness, stagnant, or unmotivated. In truth, it takes courage to rest in a world that wears exhaustion as a badge of honor, in a world that crowns those who can do everything, all the time, as superior.
There is an example held up of high achievers and none of them rest. None of them would be called lazy, stagnant, or unmotivated. But that’s where we get rest wrong.
Rest is not slothful; it is not idle. Rest is one of the more productive things we can do for our body and soul. Rest means getting to a point that we can soak in the space around us and not be all consumed by the rush of time.
Rest means sun kissed shoulders, hot pool days, popsicles dripping down our hands, late nights surrounded by fireflies, and the faint aroma of summer lingering on our skin amidst the busy days of summer.
We’ve been productive this season, but we’ve rested. We’ve rested our souls. We’ve rested our minds. We’ve absorbed the world around us in a healthy way that produces rest. We’ve lived from that place of productive rest.
I don’t want to wear exhaustion as a badge of honor, as proof of all I can juggle, all I can do. I want, instead, to wear a robe of rest, proof to all that I’ve enjoyed this life as much as I can.
I don’t want to be crowned as superior for all the hats I wear or for how full our social, work, and academic calendar can be. I want to be crowned in the remnants of summer, in the jewels of a life well lived.
A life well rested.
Let’s continue the conversation:
How have you rested productively this summer?
What are your own connotations towards the word rest?
How could you rest better in your own life?
Want to read more Little Bits of Everything?
A poem on The Edge of the Word and being in the darkness together
A letter on grief, time, loss and Ten Years
A note on mental health and being honest enough to say I’m Not Fine
A favorite on Normalizing Traveling without Kids
The most honest Start Here I can give you
A popular short story about choosing a Second Mold for our lives