#23 Liberate yourself to think and feel something truly new.
I have not arrived yet: After another year of working, I’m here on vacation in my Croatia, at last, sipping coffee next to the teal sea. The conveyor belt in my mind, however, is serving me reminders of things I have not done, lame work I have done, and an assortment of regular humiliations. The sweet cappuccino and the cleansing sea are here, but I’m not.
To arrive to rest takes me days, sometimes all the days I have set aside to recharge my batteries.
Recharging my batteries, I’m beginning to think, is the problem. This see-saw between exhaustion and recovery. What would it be like to arrive at my vacation not tired? What would it be like to recharge while I live back there, in New York City, in the midst of glass, cement, and worries?
My daughter Ena just told me, “I appreciate what you are writing here, but it sounds unattainable.” Maybe. If this were ever to be possible, it would start with imagining. So, let’s continue. What would it be like to enter our free time with actual freedom? To have a vacation where we think new thoughts, feel new feelings and experiment with seeing things differently? Instead of mere huffing and puffing recovery.
Imagine having your life back: Your wide margin of energy and the strange new permission to get lost in a new street. Of your mind. To let what has been invisible in you surprise you. Something that a mere recharging mind would never notice, let alone risk taking in, or living out?
What would it be like to have such liberty, again, like the way back then when you were risking a poem, throwing stones into the water, and letting a sense of being alive have its way with you?
#24 Learn to replenish your life as you live.
How can we break the exhaustion-recharge cycle of our work life? Where do we start? Working with people, I have experienced that the more foundational the new practice, the smaller the starting steps should be.
Here’s one way to start:
Imagine you are a phone. You are recharging yourself while in use. Imagine restoring and replenishing your inner life as you live. Imagine energy flowing in regularly while you go about your day.
Find two moments each day. Every day for a week, find two moments each day, perhaps am and pm, when you can pause to let your life catch up with you. Notice your body. Notice your thoughts. Notice your feelings. Now—and this is important—do nothing. Just stay there. Embrace inaction. Stay there for a moment longer. What comes up? Fear? Grief? Relief? (No need for any resolution or revelation here. Just noticing.) And you are done.
Harvesting. When you arrive at the end of your work day or work week, ask yourself: “What choice do I want to make now?” Enjoy the new sliver of freedom.
#25 The art of rest is the necessary art.
When I facilitate retreats for people deeply invested in serving others (like physicians) or in changing the world (like non-profit leaders), there is, always, resistance to inaction.
What’s happening: They might want to stop the old and often tired conversations they have in their minds, change the stories they have been telling themselves, and experience new ways of being themselves. That’s why they come to the retreat. But they can’t stop. They are afraid of what they will discover about themselves. Nobody, really nobody, knows what might come up. It feels a bit like a stone skipping over the surface of the water. Stopping, they sense, might sink them.
Speed protects us. And separates us from places where we can drink from a deeper well.
About thirty years ago, I read the book Sabbath by Rabbi Heschel, which kept me sane and changed my life. He writes (page 14, emphasis mine): “Just to be is a blessing. Just to live is holy. … Labor is a craft, but perfect rest is an art. …To attain a degree of excellence in art, one must accept its discipline.”
The art of rest.
Then, over the years, I followed the voice of poet David Whyte. In his latest book, Still Possible, I noticed he has fallen in love with a word (as he does from time to time). This time it is the word: necessary. It’s popping up in his new poems and his mesmerizing talks these days, and I think I know why. He is closing in, inexorably drawn to what’s essential in life. There’s been a lot of Zen-like removing and subtracting going on in his poetry, a form of radical simplification. But, some things stay.
To my reckoning, his respect for this word necessary started with him talking about rest. To me, this was a call to double down on what I first learned about the art of rest from Rabbi Heschel back in the seminary. I still have goosebumps typing his phrase, the necessary art of rest.
My raw summary of David Whyte’s take:
Rest is a doorway to holding the deepest conversation with the life you can hold. It’s a way of letting life hold and carry us.
It’s about far, far more than laying around on a beach. It’s a discipline not of doing and adding what we want (or even need) but of undoing and subtracting.
To rest is to stop pushing yourself, pushing the world, and forcing something, anything, to happen.
Most of all, it is giving yourself a f***ing break. Instead of hunting yourself into whatever you have imagined your life has to become, you drop the struggle. You don’t have to love. You don’t have to feel grace. You don’t have to be brave. Give yourself a break, finally.
It includes resting in the parts of us that we have disowned or feel we have to eliminate. It includes sitting on the humus of our humiliations, whether epic or small.
This radical experience of rest feels unsettling to our map-driven ambitions, almost terrifying. It is a form of the undoing of our accomplishments, dreams, and selves.
To really rest is to find a deep sense of foundational arrival.
Any thoughts? Please reply to this email or write a comment below. I cherish every note! 🍒
You can also check out Part 2 of this issue about rest.