A Time for Rest
For those of you who follow me on Instagram, you are privy to the fact that, for the past few weeks, I have been nothing short of completely exhausted. I started a new part time job (at Starbucks, for those of you wondering - it’s actually a great gig with decent benefits) while taking on a handful of new design clients. Add that to our eternally full social calendar, throw in some hobbies, and top it with a heaping scoop of content creation and Instagram management, and you get one really freaking tired girl.
You might be thinking: if you’re so tired, why don’t you just rest? Cancel your plans, stop posting so much on Instragram, and spend a couple of days reading on the sofa. And you would be totally correct to think that. The problem is, I love all of these things. I don’t want to give any of them up, even for a day. I couldn’t even rank a few top priorities, because they all feel important to me.
There are two things that I know for sure. One is that all of our debts are paid eventually. Every hour we spend working late instead of sleeping, every minute we spend in an activity rather than at rest, every meal skipped, extra coffee consumed, and deadline missed will come back around to haunt us. The pendulum swings both ways. It’s as natural as breathing. The sooner we come to understand this fact, the sooner we can begin to make peace with it and try to achieve some measure of balance in our lives.
The other thing that I know beyond a doubt is that overwork kills creativity. The harder you work, the more you try to force yourself to create, the less your mind will cooperate. Those moments of easy ideas and blissful stillness depend entirely on our ability to rest and recharge. A tired brain will get us nowhere, except for potentially into the depths of an unpleasant depression.
I recently read Stillness is the Key by Ryan Holiday. It was recommended to me by a dear friend who, like me, is constantly questioning the world and the people around us. While the book seemed geared towards those at the very helm of capitalism, like politicians, CEOs, and other high income, high stress occupations, there were a few key pieces of information that were quite profound. Holiday’s message in this aptly named book is that without stillness, we have nothing. Chaos breeds unhappiness. Stress is a not-so-silent killer. If we want to be excellent at what we do, we need to be equally excellent at letting go.
Needless to say, this book appeared in my life at just the right moment. I believe Holiday’s sentiments are things that we intuitively know. Longing for a countryside vacation, or a solitary day spent strolling around, these are things so many of desire. We desire stillness. So how does one manage an entire life, full of commitments, responsibilities, wishes, dreams, passions - and find stillness in all of it? Holiday recommends planning time for revitalizing hobbies. What he doesn’t cover is what to do if you have too many revitalizing hobbies, and not enough time in the day? Somehow, it is even stressful choosing between spending an afternoon reading a novel or watching a favorite movie, two incredibly relaxing activities.
For me, this exhaustion culminated in a 36 hour period of intense illness. I had the migraine to end all migraines, a fever, a sore throat, and overwhelming lethargy. I have always been this way… relying on my body to step in and tell me that it cannot take any more. I’m not sure whether this is the result of a personality trait or if this was taught to me by family or society. Either way, as I get older I feel how detrimental this pattern is. The resilience I had at nineteen is a shadow of a memory now, and at only twenty-seven I cannot imagine how much harder it will get.
So why did I bother to write about all of this if I didn’t have some solution? If there is no moral to this story or right answer learned along the way? Because I know that I am not alone in this. If I wait to share these thoughts and feelings until I have surely figured them out, I fear I will never have anything to write at all.
If you needed someone to remind you, someone to give you permission to cancel those plans or call out of work, here it is. Taking our own advice is near impossible, but perhaps taking the advice of others is simpler. Take care of yourself, take care of your body and mind and soul. Without them, we are nothing.
Until next time,
Nicki
