True Rest

Lush Green - Sunrise at Pearl Lake, August 2024

The cold is already seeping into my legs, though I’ve only just made it past the driveway. My spiked winter running shoes bite into the ice beneath a thin layer of powdery snow, my headlamp piercing the clear blackness of this early hour. It’s -3’ Fahrenheit, and I feel slow, heavy - I’m hefting myself like a sack of potatoes with each step. I promise my aching muscles and tired brain that after the run, just these few miles, we will all head home and rest. 

I believe myself every time. Yet, too often the “rest” is a few minutes to eat something nourishing, gulp down some decaf while checking my phone to be sure the world hasn’t ended, and then it’s off to the next item on the schedule. This is not the rest my muscles, brain and I had in mind. 

The concept of true rest intrigues. To be fair, many of us don’t have the space in our schedules for plentiful rest. But true rest - that can be had with awareness and intention. In my post Downtime, I wrote that downtime is mostly a break from the thing you are spending a lot of your time doing. A change from the status quo. True rest doesn’t necessarily equal an evening on the recliner. 

This  Psychology Today article, "The 7 Kinds of Rest You Actually Need,"  points out that sleep isn’t always the right answer to the rest we actually need. You might be getting your eight hours like clockwork but still feeling burned out because you need rest from a category other than physical and mental. The seven types of rest conceptualized by Saundra Dalton-Smith, M.D., author of the book Sacred Rest, are: physical, mental, sensory, emotional, social, creative, and spiritual. The idea is not that we need rest from these categories so much as we need rest within them. For example, spiritual rest doesn’t mean you need a break from church, rather that you need to spend some time connecting with something greater than yourself - and nature fits the bill nicely here.

There’s a story that’s been on my mind lately, which I’ll loosely summarize: One lovely spring day Claude Monet was sitting gazing at the lush garden bursting with greenery and fragrant blooms. A neighbor strolled by and said, “Ah, you are resting?” Monet shook his head, “No, I am working.” A couple of days later Monet was standing at his easel applying his brush to canvas. The same neighbor came by and said, “Ah, you are working!” Monet shook his head, “No, I am resting.” 

This story captures the gist of creative rest: immersion in surroundings that feed our sensory selves, without the pressure to produce art in that moment. Another example of true rest that can be had in a brief period of time: gazing at the photo that heads this post brings an emotional calm. The mirror of the lake framed by the long grasses and dense shrubbery is a boon contrasted with our snowy January whiteness.

Thinking about the concept of true rest on my run this morning, I noticed I was carrying a lot of tension. I was fixated on the strip of white road, monitoring my traction, just getting through it. Well that wasn’t any fun at all. I looked around. At the half-remnant of the sepia Wolf-Moon, dancing between black sky and a hovering haze of clouds. At the dots of lights making a fairy village of the homes nestled in the snow. At winter-bare trees, gnarled branches and twisty twigs, frozen mid-undulation and silhouetted in bizarre beauty. What a delight! Rather than slogging to my turnaround point the awareness of my surroundings created a new perspective. I felt lucky and happy to be out there. My step felt lighter and my muscles and brain relaxed into an easy stride. A few moments of true rest.