rest well
I’m rethinking my relationship with rest.
If you’ve read enough of these letters, you probably know that I have struggled with the concept of rest.
For a long time, I didn’t know how to rest, but after the stressful year that was 2023, this year, I’ve learned how to rest a little.
I’ve inserted pockets of time in my calendar for some travel, weekly no-meeting days, occasional and intentional time-off to create more memories with friends, and brief respites after completing projects. I’ve had to plan my resting periods and breaks weeks in advance because resting doesn’t come naturally to me.
But last week, while speaking to a client who’s working on a book that explores some biblical principles, I learned something new about rest that I hadn’t considered.
The client said something about God working for six days and resting for one day. I know the creation story, so her statement was nothing unusual or unfamiliar. But it was when she repeated it to me that I really caught her drift.
“He worked for 6 days and rested on one day.” She said, “6 days of work, one day of rest. One day. Not a weekend. Not a summer. One day. One out of seven. You only get one, and you have to use it well.”
One day.
Carl Newport, the author of Deep Work, often writes about the concept of deep breaks.
Newport describes deep work as the act of focusing on a task for a prolonged time without distraction and deep breaks as allowing your mind a chance to regroup and recharge without impeding your ability to quickly ramp your concentration back up.
For a long time, I paid close attention to Newport’s perspective on deep work.
I use the Pomodoro technique to achieve a state of near-absolute focus when writing: 50 minutes of work, a 10-minute break, and repeat. Zooming out, I do the same with my days, weeks, and, over the past few months, the summer by having intermittent time-offs.
But I haven’t paid enough attention to Newport’s definition of deep breaks.
I take breaks (rests), but they aren’t deep enough. I haven’t always used them as a chance to regroup and recharge. At times, what I have called resting or taking a break was me exerting more energy and giving even more of myself into another seemingly less productive task or situation.
For example, while resting, I’d check and respond to emails, run several errands, or scroll through Reddit. If it’s not Reddit, it’s the app that Musk is unintentionally trying hard but failing to destroy or the other app that Zuckerberg created, but even he doesn’t frequent.
More crucially, I rest in such a way that, at times, doesn’t enable or prepare me to resume work after the break.
Instead of feeling refreshed and ready to work, my rest sometimes impedes my ability to quickly ramp my concentration back up. I would resume work feeling like I hadn’t rested enough and then try to eat minutes off the clock by resting a little more.
It’s somewhat similar to the feeling most people have when they have to resume work after a weekend.
You wish the weekend was just one more day longer and struggle to get settled on a Monday morning. I know the feeling—we both do—and I’ve come to realize that that feeling exists because the rest that precedes the work wasn’t deep, wholesome, and restorative enough.
We don’t do enough with the time we set aside to rest, and that makes work much more difficult to recommit to.
When this happens, most people resolve to extend their rest by a few more minutes, an extra hour, or maybe the entire day and be just a little less productive during that extended resting period. And just like that, our metaphorical one day of rest becomes more than one, and our six days of work becomes less.
God rested on one day.
But we have tricked ourselves into thinking we need longer rest. We tell ourselves we need the entire weekend, more time off, and more travel days when, in fact, we need a better way to use the limited time we have for rest. Our rests need to be restorative more than anything else. They need to be sacred and entirely focused on enriching our souls and every facet of our lives, excluding work.
We need to be more intentional about the time we dedicate to rest and truly maximize those moments because when we don’t, it affects the time we are supposed to spend being productive.
For all the calls for 4-day work weeks and more long-weekends, there is a good chance that many people haven’t figured out how to rest and rest well. No matter how long they are allowed to rest, they likely won’t feel rested when they resume work because they will spend those extra days doing everything but resting.
So, I’m rethinking my relationship with rest.
I’m rethinking how I spend the limited minutes, hours, days, and weeks I have the privilege of taking off to rest. Most importantly, I realize that work isn’t getting in the way of my rest; my rest, when not done well, gets in the way of my work.
Maybe work isn’t the problem—unless you work for a boss who is the foreshadowing of the antichrist himself, with colleagues who derive joy from getting on your last nerves, or with clients who seem to have been molded, packaged and sent straight from hell—but maybe rest is the problem; perhaps that’s where we need to pay more attention.
If you’re going to rest, rest well.
“It is wise to be lazy, intermittently.”
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