Healingpaloozas

A day of "resting," plus a strong case for supported, communal, actual resting

I’ve been mulling over a variety of perspectives on rest and non-productivity—regular readers know that it comes up a lot in this newsletter. I’ve been reading an impassioned call to do less in Oliver Burkeman’s Four Thousand Weeks and reading advocates of rest as diverse as Robert Louis Stevenson (An Apology for Idlers), and Judith Shulevitz (The Sabbath World). I’ve been thinking about rest in the context of illness thanks to

Michelle Spencer

, Sarah Ramey, Meghan O’Rourke and other chronic illness writers.

Recently, a reader emailed me,

“Every time I read one of your newsletters I think about how much this girl needs to get on to Akilah Richards!!! De-school your mind baby!!”

Richards writes about…you guessed it…the need to slow down, specifically to unlearn what she considers damaging lessons from contemporary schooling, and also to begin savoring, a word I find very compelling. This reader also recommended The Nap Ministry, which, well, I think you get it by now.

The majority of people I know who came out the gate hard-driving and ambitious by choice have hit a wall of one kind or another by our mid-thirties—walls imposed by a sudden physical or mental health decline, unexpected caretaking responsibilities, an urgent desire for meaning, a cracking of prior illusions, a radical shifting of priorities, an overwhelming sense that we had thought our world was one thing and actually it is something else entirely. It appears that the next generation may be getting here even earlier with quiet quitting: quitting any effort to go above and beyond at work, quitting the idea that job is core to your identity, and spending more time doing other things, among them resting.

A day of “resting” (my version)

Here’s the thing: It’s hard for many of us to even imagine a day of rest, let alone a week of rest or a month. It’s rest, sure, but what is it? Like what does a day of resting even look like for someone who hasn’t done it much?

I’ve recently been thrown unwillingly into a mental and physical low period, a forced rest of the sort that Katherine May writes about in her book Wintering. Forced incapacitation is historically, as Michelle Spencer notes in her recent newsletter, one of the only things that can get me to even experiment with genuine rest.

But let’s get down to nuts and bolts here, because “rest” is kind of vague. Let me tell you, actually, what a couple different days might look like for me in this state.

Version 1: high fatigue & extreme brain fog

• 7-8: Get up, get toddler up, take him to daycare.

• 8-11: Go back to sleep.

• 11-2: Eat, sit down at computer, respond to two emails, feel completely drained, muster all my energy to water the plants, feel worthless, go up to bed, draw the curtains, watch two episodes of Marvelous Mrs. Maisel.

• 2-4: Go back to sleep.

• 4-5: Get up, do half the dishes in the sink, feel exhausted, hate how sticky the counters are, pick up son from daycare.

• 5-7:30: Entertain and feed toddler while sitting as much as possible, then put him to bed.

• 7:30-8:30: Order takeout and watch more Mrs. Maisel.

• 8:30: Go to bed.

Well, that was painful to write. Really I have actually spent a day like that? Multiple days? This doesn’t seem to me so much like a day of rest as a day of mandatory sleeping. It brings up all kinds of shame about the fact that my work even allows for this type of rest, and makes me feel like I don’t deserve it because so many others could never spend a day like this. I also cannot accept the many hours of TV watching as “rest.” Sitting in the sunshine listening to birds is rest, not sitting in a darkened bedroom staring at a screen—right? The whole thing is very fraught and problematic, and it doesn’t seem like this is what all those other people are talking about when they say “rest.”

Version 2: moderate fatigue, moderate brain fog

• 8:30-10: Wake up (husband did morning toddler care), do gentle yoga, eat, shower.

• 10-11: Sit down and write in fits and starts, resulting in 100 words that seem blunt and elementary but at least it’s something.

• 11-12: Read about wombs.

• 12-1: Sauté mushrooms and spinach for a salad and grain bowl.

• 1-3: Nap.

• 3-4: Feel a little good about all the things I got done and so watch an episode of Mrs. Maisel.

• 4 on: Clean a little, pick up toddler, etc etc.

Well, ok, this day was a little less painful, I got things done! I did yoga, I wrote, I read, I made a healthy lunch…hmm ok, well this is starting to sound a lot like a checklist…I’m suddenly wondering, is this rest? Does a checklist of officially “restful” activities equal rest? Something feels a little off about it, like actual rest doesn’t operate in checklist format, but in more of a fluid, goalless, and contemplative format. But I’ll tell you something: if I sit in the sun in contemplation, before long I am thinking about the things I need to do, and then I am thinking about how I should be able to just sit in contemplation, and then I am thinking that if I meditated more then I would be able to sit and rest appropriately, so then I’m thinking I should be meditating, and then we are kind of back to where we started, right?

Where does this leave me vis-a-vis rest?

So is the answer that I am just incapable of real rest, and that actually in order to achieve rest I would need to do a lot of work unlearning things, and de-schooling myself, and training my mind and so on? Ugh. Another big project.

Let me suggest, and in doing so experiment with, a third way. Last week, I spent five days in an AirBnB with six friends for what we termed Healingpalooza. It was originally designed to support one person in a time of struggle, but, honestly, almost everyone there needed a healingpalooza right now. We’ve got a grab bag of the greatest hits: chronic illness flare-ups, work precarity, relationship crises, and more. There was a lot of half-hearted, half-day working, a lot of naps, and a lot of sitting splayed out on the oversized couches under bizarre paintings of dogs drinking wine, sometimes staring into space, sometimes talking briefly, sometimes attempting to take pictures under a locked “secret” door in a bookcase to see what was behind it, sometimes on our phones trying to find that one recipe we made two years ago, sometimes leafing through books from the 60’s written by UFO conspiracists. At some point we would cook dinner, or some people would, whoever could manage it, and then sometimes we would leave half the dishes dirty in the sink.

This scene, to me, feels the closest to genuine rest of all my versions of “resting.” The key ingredient is that I am resting with other people. We are feeding off each other’s total goallessness. We are offering each other periodic, very light mental stimulation and a natural flow of random topics to mull over, but not deeply, and maybe there’s something to laugh about here or there. There is a generalized permission to rest, granted by the presence of other people resting. This is related to Judith Shulevitz’s point that Sabbath can only be truly observed within a community of people observing Sabbath, which I wrote about here. But it is also something different, which is an observation that, even short of a whole community committing to a work-free Saturday, a few people resting together can be more restful and replenishing than one person resting alone, at least for me. Resting alone feels like work. Resting together feels like how I imagine rest should feel: boundless and unconstrained and slow and useless and surprising and downright enjoyable.

Problem is, in the universe of dinner reservations, and work happy hours, and lunches planned two weeks in advance, and kid nap schedules, a universe populated by people who generally have as much trouble resting as I do, it’s not exactly easy to organize overlapping rest time. Healingpalooza was a unique and glittering aberration, a welcome glitch in the system, a hole in time. But even if I won’t be doing this exact thing again in the foreseeable future, I am definitely going to start looking for opportunities for mini healingpaloozas: small groups, for a bit of time, that want to rest together.

I have questions for you about rest…

• What types of rest do you currently practice? How do you know it’s rest?

• Do you rest with others? If yes, what makes it different than resting alone? If no, do you think it would feel supportive?

• How have you been able to differentiate rest from distraction? How does rest leave you feeling and how does distraction/entertainment (like my Marvelous Mrs. Maisel watching) leave you feeling?

Please, let’s discuss!