Here's a question for you, Reader: what do you expect rest to do for you?
I used to expect rest to feel like dessert — a reward for after the big win, for whenever I'd finally "earned" it.
Last week, lake-deep with nowhere to be and nothing to do, I caught myself expecting the spaciousness to make things happen for me.
Was I relaxing enough to access my intuition?
Was I actually hitting the deep reset button?
By day three, floating in emerald water with not another soul in sight, I finally clocked how absurd it was to be peppering myself with these burdensome questions.
The reason I was pressuring myself to unwind, if I'm honest, was to "get" insights about a decision. And of course, the more I chased that clarity, the more it evaded me.
It strikes me that for slowness and joy to be spiritual or subversive, we have to unpick them from the landscape of urgency and responsibility around — and within — ourselves.
Each night by the lake, I passed my worry about this decision to my dream maker (my preferred nickname for our unconscious) — like a note slipped under a door: show me the way.
What I got back in the morning was a stiff neck from an unfamiliar pillow and what my mentor calls "grocery store dreams" — the hazy, ho-hum, trying-to-get-my-suitcase-packed kind.
She'd caution me that dreams like these don't count for much. But I believe all dreams show us where we are, especially the mundane ones.
So maybe rest did work on me after all.
Not by handing me the answer I craved, but by patiently showing me where I'm standing. And how uncomfortable it is to be still in such a messy place.
Maybe that's the deeper subversion Lamott's talking about: not just resting, but trusting the unremarkable evidence it reveals.
Love,
Brooke