Friday, August 26, 2022
David Whyte
Rest
Rest is the conversation between what we love to do and how we love to be. Rest is not stasis but the essence of giving and receiving. Rest is an act of remembering, imaginatively and intellectually, but also physiologically and physically. We often hate ourselves for our procrastination, when it is often only the deeply disguised need to rest deeply enough to reconstitute and reimagine our approach. To rest is to become present in a different way than through action, and especially to give up on the will as the prime motivator of endeavor, with its endless outward need to reward itself through established goals. To rest is to give up on worrying and fretting and the sense that there is something wrong with the world unless we put it right; to rest is to fall back, literally or figuratively from outer targets, not even to a sense of inner accomplishment or an imagined state of attained stillness, but to a different kind of meeting place, a living, breathing state of natural exchange…
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‘REST’
From
CONSOLATIONS:
The Solace, Nourishment and Underlying Meaning
of Everyday Words. © 2015 David Whyte
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The ability to take real rest is almost an art form; strangely, almost a discipline: the discipline of putting things aside, especially putting aside the will, and the false self, supported by endless endeavour: this is not to give up on the will but to invite it back again as a good servant to the soul's desires instead of the heartless and exhausting task master it becomes when we push it to the leading edge of our identity.