I don’t know about you but I remember as a kid longing for summer to start. We would joyfully hurl ourselves into freedom on the last day of school. By upper elementary/middle school that would include the defiant singing, chanting really, of Pink Floyd’s “We don’t need no education…” It was true liberation. One of the things I love about being an educator is that I still get to experience that wild joy of the end of the school year, deliciously anticipating three months of actual weekends and spaciousness in my work with time to think and dream and create. Amen.
I’m so grateful to have work that has an ebb and a flow, and especially an ebb. It’s when the tide is out that all the wonders of the sea appear, that you can discover and imagine. I remember the extreme boredom of those dog days of August from my childhood. We had done every fun thing summer had to offer already and were longing for school to start again. Now we live in a culture that eschews boredom like the plague filling every waking moment, for everyone of every age, with activities and digital media and diversions of all kinds. Our capacity to be still long enough to even discover what might be calling us seems to shrink by the hour.
I recently heard writer Anne Lamott say, “If you want to be a writer, look at your do-list and take two things off of it.” Because writing requires time and attention. It requires space to notice, to think, to let your mind wander. Really if you want to be a human, look at your do-list and take two things off of it. Or if your do-list is like mine, take ten things off! Because being a person, really being a person, requires spaciousness and time to be still, to follow pleasure, to get curious about what’s around the corner, even if you didn’t plan to go there.
Tricia Hersey, creator of the Nap Ministry, writes in Rest is Resistance: A Manifesto, “Rest makes invention and imagination accessible. Rest gives us the ability to test our freedom. Our souls are calling to see differently. To move differently. To feel differently. To rest. Rest as a subversive act. The deepest act of resistance.” Hersey is especially concerned with the extraction of labor from Black and Brown bodies in our white supremacist capitalist culture. In that context rest is not just personal resistance to our culture but a political act. Regardless of the body you find yourself in, Hersey’s passionate call for personal and collective push back against a culture that demands that we do more in every waking moment, and sometimes even in how we manage, measure, and perform the act of sleep, is intended for you.
Notice that Hersey doesn’t say that rest makes you more productive, kinder, able to be a better person. It makes you free. It makes you a whole human being. It makes you bigger than your do-list, your job, your role as a parent, spouse, caretaker. It opens up possibilities for who you are becoming in ways you otherwise don’t have the time or attention to notice.
My beloved will laugh when she reads this because I am the worst kind of sit-stiller. I am a no-napper, what’s the next thing, how can I use every waking hour to squeeze out more more more kind of person. Consequently, when I teach about rest as a spiritual practice, usually linked to Shabbat, I invite people to consider that rest can be active. For me rest is the space where I can lose myself in doing, or move in a way that allows my mind to wander. It’s hiking and gardening and kayaking and making art. Inspired by the coming of summer, I have already scheduled two solo camping trips and a bookbinding class at the Crucible and I have recently started a qi gong class. Each of these adventures invites me into a different part of myself, where I can joyfully explore, discover and create.
The great hasidic teacher Rabbi Nachman of Breslov said, “Always remember, joy is not incidental to spiritual quest. It is vital.” Joy, rest, possibility, spaciousness … What is awaiting you this summer? How can you make room for it?
