Radical Rest
Can learning to slow down help our brains to speed up?
This morning, I awoke feeling more well-rested than I have in weeks. It’s a feeling that is somewhat foreign to me, a perpetual night owl who requires two cups of coffee in order to function before 10 a.m. To say that I’ve never been much of a morning person is an understatement, as my family and friends can attest. But yesterday, I went to bed before midnight—an early hour for me —and slept a full uninterrupted eight hours.
I haven’t been sleeping well for a while. I know I’m not the only one; the stress of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, teetering economic crisis, and national civil rights movement all occurring simultaneously weighs on the subconscious. There’s a tension I carry from the day into the night, and I have a hard time shutting my brain off. Even when I do fall into a Melatonin-induced slumber, my sleep is fitful. This is also somewhat new to me; my mother used to say that a hurricane couldn’t wake me up, I slept so deeply.
You know how exhaustion can seep into your bones? I’m talking about the feeling that sets in when you’re so profoundly tired, or perhaps jet-lagged, that it’s as if you’ve entered a sort of Twilight Zone, this in-between plane of reality where your ability to function is not just dampened, but inhibited. This is the language of the body; its dire reminder that this depletion is not sustainable. Rest is how we replenish our mental and physical energy, and when we’re deprived of it for too long, we’re vulnerable to disillusionment, apathy, and burnout. Within America’s work-obsessed capitalist culture, rest becomes an act of radical self-preservation.
In 2017, American author and activist Adrienne Maree Brown wrote about “living through the unveiling.” “Things are not getting worse,” she said. “They are getting uncovered. We must hold each other tight as we continue to pull back the veil.” We are in a moment of reckoning, and as we continue this unveiling, we need one another at our most fortified. We need our rest, our dreaming, to remember that another world is within reach. We begin the work to make it real when we wake up.