Rest gets a bad name in American society. Work culture demands long hours, and there is a push to work more hours without paying attention to the diminishing returns of productivity with overwork. We go places on weekends to shop or be entertained. We go on vacation and come back wishing we had a vacation from our vacations.

Sometimes we just need to rest. According to this article, there are seven types of rest:

• Creative rest
• Mental rest
• Physical rest
• Social rest
• Emotional rest
• Sensory rest
• Spiritual rest

Sleeping and doing nothing are not the solutions to most of these needs for rest. For example, creative rest involves resting your drive for creativity by exposure to other people’s creativity and walking in nature, while social rest means restricting your time with people. Spiritual rest doesn’t seem to involve a break from spirituality, so there’s inconsistency in the model.

I am going to find some time to rest this afternoon. Right now I’m listening to classicalelectronica (not joking; that’s the playlist name) and taking a break from the novel (although we’ll see how long that lasts). I’ll spend the day with just Richard and not embroil myself in anything overly emotional; maybe practice mindfulness. But the idea of these types of rest is that we distribute them throughout our day, with brief breaks for each. This will take me a bit of thought.

How can I do that and subvert the time paradigm mentioned above? One way is to take my free time seriously and not let work encroach upon it. Some employers have the nerve to call this “quiet quitting”, when in actuality it’s “not working for free”. I’m lucky; my boss is a professor of recreation and wants me to preserve my free time; others are not so lucky. The second is to look at what types of rest I neglect and plan for those. I have focused a lot on physical rest; I have neglected spiritual rest for a while because of my struggles with spirituality and religion.

I’ve written enough about resting; I think it’s time for me to rest.