The Slow Way Newsletter: Rest Is Not a Requirement or a Privilege. It's an Invitation to Humility
a weekly newsletter for all the frantic strivers, serial doers & weary achievers
unhurried thoughts
"Learn to see God in the details of your life, for He is everywhere."
- Teresa of Avila
Rest is an Invitation
Wednesday morning I drove thirty minutes to the doctor’s office, where I sat and allowed myself to be injected with a long needle over and over into my forehead, behind my ears, in my neck, and in my shoulders. This is one of the ways I’ve been treating the migraines that began a year and a half ago after a fall down the stairs. I’ve sat and watched the needle come at my face every three months for the past year. Even so, every time I sit in that chair for my five-minute needle-face-treatment, I’m nervous. The needle going into the spot between my eyebrows? The popping sound when it stabs the skin behind my ear? Gross.
If you’re feeling stressed by this I apologize.
All that to say, even as I cringe in the seconds before the shots come at my head, I also feel something pent up in me, a kind of migraine-anxiety, release. I know this treatment helps. And because I know it works, there’s some relief with every shot that goes in.
What a weird year this has been. Of course, that’s an understatement. But the shutdown has reformatted our collective DNA in some way. Maybe not for all of us, but I’ll never look at masks the same way as I did a year and a half ago. Masks saved my life. Masks made it possible for Ace to make it through a winter in school without an ER visit for the first time in his life. Masks will be a way for me to take care of people in the future when I have a cold and I still feel the need to go to the store. I’ve changed. The way I live in the world has changed.
My concussion changed me as well. Before I fell down the four concrete stairs with my then-four-year-old in September of 2019, I believed I had a responsibility to wake up early. I was a mom who needed to Get Stuff Done. And if I was ever going to work out, or write a poem, or (Worst of All!) respond to my email, it was going to be done between the hour of 5 and 6. And I did it, no matter what time I’d gone to bed the night before. I woke early and worked...all through my twenties and all through my thirties.
Then Ace hugged me with all his love at the top of the stairs and we fell down backwards. I saved his head, and in the process, damaged mine.
Injuring my brain was life-altering. Not just in the way I understand my limits, but because I literally cannot understand my limits or understand at all, if I don’t acknowledge my limits. I have to sleep a lot more than I used to. And if I don’t, I can’t write anything, because my brain won’t let me. And every time I push myself, and assume that I can sleep less or work harder without consequences, I immediately begin to have the kind of migraine that fuzzes out all my thoughts, that weakens my body, that removes me from service to anyone.
I tell that story to say: Sometimes rest is simply a nice idea. That’s what it was for me for a long time. And even as I wrote and spoke about rest, I forced myself to sleep less for the sake of getting the writing and speaking out into the world. There often comes a time when we need to face the consequences of not living into our own teaching. I did. I am. And I’m learning.
So I got all those needles in my head and face Wednesday morning, and I came home to work, only to find myself tired from the process, and in pain. You know what I did? Something I would have been deeply ashamed to tell you two years ago. I got into my bed at 11 am on a work day, and I took a two hour nap.
The other day I had a conversation with my husband about this message of slowness I’ve been spouting in this newsletter. “Don’t you think it’s a tricky line to walk? To tell everyone to rest more and move slower without acknowledging that you have the financial stability to take a nap?”
Of course I do. Listen, we have to acknowledge that there's a difference between taking a nap when you’re an hourly worker who gets a migraine. Choosing to work through physical pain because you have to support your family is very different than being a writer who gets paid for freelance writing pieces I can finish later. It’s important to say that, and it’s important to acknowledge that my husband has a salary career that supports our family. When we get sick we can rest. And it’s an injustice that not everyone can.
But I’m most interested in the ways our culture talks or thinks about rest. I’m more interested in the shame I feel for lying down at 11 am on a Wednesday because there’s an internal dialogue that tells me a lazy thing to do, whether or not my body needs it. Because the truth is that listening to the needs of our bodies is deeply related to listening to the needs of our souls. Both require humility, and humility teaches us to love--ourselves and one another.
That’s why rest is a spiritual practice. And here’s what it looks like for me: 1) Acknowledging that I am weak and need grace, both physically for my body and spiritually. I need God’s help to either heal my broken brain, or give me the grace to live with pain, holding it with humility and letting it shape who I become, how I love and allow myself to be loved. 2) Allowing myself to rest, not because I deserve it (like a Wine Mom deserves her 5 o’clock glass of chardonnay after a day of toddler whining). It’s not about deserving, it’s about kindness to myself, and acknowledgment that God loves me and wants me to learn to be gentle with myself. And 3) Holding gratitude for the option of taking care of myself in a dangerous world where very few people are given that option.
Teresa of Avila taught her nuns to “Learn to see God in the details of your life, for He is everywhere.” When I think about slowness, or rest, or even the act of being gentle with our imperfect and tired bodies I want to come back to this idea: God is here in the details of our lives, and there is something for us to discover in the migraine or the chronic pain, or the job that won’t let us rest.
The spiritual life is allowing each “detail” to point to the love of God. The more we recognize the love of God in this moment and the next moment, the more we are transformed to love and serve the world, even if we sleep from time to time in the process.
a slow practice
So what does it look like for you to practice rest in your day? Maybe you don’t have a physical reason to take a break. Can you learn to rest even then?
This week practice a simple acknowledgment of your rest when you lay down to sleep (whether it’s during the day or night.) Here’s a prayer taken from Teresa of Avila’s work, and found in John Kirvan’s Let Nothing Disturb You: 30 Days with a Great Spiritual Teacher:
“Let nothing, O Lord,
disturb the silence of this night.
Let nothing make me afraid.
Let me wake refreshed,
ready to love and care for my neighbor
as you have loved and cared for me,
and indeed as I love and care for myself.”
Maybe you can write that prayer down to keep next to your bed. And when you wake, can you thank God for being there in the details of your life? Can you recognize that your rest is allowing you to love and care for your neighbor?
It’s a simple practice, but it’s powerful. Our rest matters, not because it’s a requirement or a privilege, but because it allows us to love the people around that God has placed in our lives.
Let’s go to sleep this week with the love and care of God on our minds, and wake ready to offer that love and care to the world.