January 20, 2022

On Resting

I am not very busy right now, and I’m leaning into it. I spent the second half of December really struggling with mental health, and then picked up my first bad cold in nearly two years on January 3 (maybe Schrodinger’s Covid? Rapid test was negative, but who really knows, though it doesn’t matter oh so much since everything in the province had already shut down anyway), and now the entire city has been covered with 50cm of snow, followed by above freezing temps, and then freezing again, so that the world is a solid block of ice, and I’m going to take that as a message from the universe that I’m probably well served by staying close to home.

I’ve been easing back into my work with 49thShelf, but going slower than usual. I submitted a draft of my novel in December and so the “writing a novel” space in my schedule has opened right up, and I’m keeping it that way. I was pushing my MAKE THE LEAP blogging course for February, but not getting any response…which is not so surprising considering how everyone is entering this new year uncertain and depleted (what if I made ANOTHER course called LIE DOWN ON THE FLOOR instead?) And have just decided to take that space as a gift, spaciousness being a theme in my mindset these days. For there to be room to breathe, to think, to sleep, to do nothing. I’m reading Welcoming the Unwelcome, by Pema Chodran, which accords with these ideas. To create space for letting the world in instead of trying to fight it, to submit instead of resist. To open my heart and let life happen—because it was always going to happen anyway.

I spent the Christmas holidays not exercising at all, because just didn’t have the energy for it, and this not pushing myself was new to me, and it was neat because two weeks later I started exercising again and it was because I wanted to, not because I felt like I had to. So giving myself space to rest, to be still, to not perpetually being driven to go go go. Which, counter-intuitively, gave me the space to want to go again.

I’m not a huge embracer of the idea of “rest” in theory (while I like it in practice), mostly because everyone who’s talking about it sounds very obnoxious and has jobs like “pet therapist” which means there’s not so much to rest from anyway, and I’m also wary of anything that people are talking about instead of just shutting up and doing. But oh, how excellent doing rest has been for me. Perhaps there’s something to it.