«Resting is not surrender or weakness. It is the wise act of one who knows that to give light, they also need to receive it.»

Going deeper

Jon Kabat-Zinn, who created the mindfulness-based stress reduction program, describes two ways of inhabiting the mind. One is the doing mode: the part of us that plans, compares, solves, and measures the gap between how things are and how they should be. It is a valuable mode, and thanks to it we cook, work, and care for others. The trouble begins when it becomes the only mode, because then even rest turns into one more task you can do well or badly.

Think of a Sunday afternoon. You finally sit down on the couch, but your mind keeps going over the week's to-do list, or your hand reaches for the phone, and twenty minutes later you get up more tired than before. The body was still, but the mind kept working. It is the doing mode wearing pajamas.

The being mode offers something different: not doing anything special, but staying with what is here, with a kind attention. Kabat-Zinn speaks of attitudes such as not striving to get anywhere, accepting the moment as it is, and being patient with yourself. Pouring a cup of tea and feeling the warmth in your hands, the scent rising, the first sip, with no hurry to finish, is already a small doorway. There is nothing to achieve there, and that is precisely what restores.

If a voice shows up saying you haven't earned it yet, mindfulness doesn't ask you to fight it. It invites you to notice it for what it is: a thought with its own history, passing through the mind without any authority over your day. Perhaps resting is also a way of remembering that you matter beyond what you produce, and of letting light come in through the same place it has so long only gone out.