I’m not sure how many of us are feeling truly rested at the moment. Because it’s more than just the number of hours we sleep.
Therefore, I wanted to share words of invitation from David Whyte, which I’m currently sitting with…
Rest… is the conversation between what we love to do and how we love to be. Rest is the essence of giving and receiving; an act of remembering, imaginatively and intellectually, but also psychologically and physically. To rest is to give up on the already exhausted will as the prime motivator of endeavour, 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 are there to put it right; to rest is to fall back, literally or figuratively, from outer targets and shift the goal not to an inner, static bull’s eye, an imagined state of perfect stillness, but to an inner state of natural exchange…
Rested, we are ready for the world but not held hostage by it; rested, we care again for the right things and the right people in the right way. In rest we re-establish the goals that make us more generous, more courageous, more of an invitation, someone we want to remember, and someone others would want to remember too.
David Whyte in Consolations – the solace, nourishment and underlying meaning of everyday words, 2019, Canongate Books
May you rest well at that deeper level, whatever your days and hours of sleep might look like.