Welcome Rest
Labor Day, celebrated May 1 around the world, and on the first Monday in September here in the United States, is supposed to be about the workers. About those who have built our economy, our cities, our roads. Those who produce our goods and provide our services. You might remember a few years back the labor movement had a tagline, “the people who brought you the Weekend and the 40 hour work week.” Labor Day was supposed to be an extra day of leisure (once a year!!). A day free from laboring, when productivity doesn’t rule our lives, and we can enjoy a rest with family and friends.
In 2023, Labor Day continues to be a day off for some but not all in our country. It’s not a day off for those we’ve come to call essential workers, nor for people who work in fast food restaurants or gas stations or convenience stores. Folks who work in retail establishments that advertise huge Labor Day sales don’t get the day off. Farm workers bringing in the harvest don’t spend the day at barbecues or beaches. Labor Day is less about rewarding workers and more about a symbolic end of summer. Neighborhood pools close the next day. In some parts of the country, seasonal shops put up the shutters and “see you next year” signs, and cabin owners.
Whatever Labor Day has or has not meant for the labor force in general, and individuals workers and employees specifically, this weekend seems a fitting time to reflect on the changing rhythms of work and rest. Work is a hot topic in mainstream news and media: quiet quitting (a misnomer that actually refers to completing the hours and tasks assigned without investing time and labor beyond contracted requirements); lazy girl jobs (a poorly named concept that refers to jobs that lend themselves to quiet quitting); remote work vs on-site work and who benefits from each; unemployment rates; worker shortages; overtime for salaried employees. All of these have been in the news in just the past week.
Meanwhile, rest is a hot topic in my ministerial circles and in activist circles and even occasionally on some mainstream media. Friday morning I heard a repeat of an interview with Dr. Saundra Dalton-Smith, author of Sacred Rest: Recover Your Life, Renew Your Energy, Restore Your Sanity. My Facebook feed is peppered almost every day with mentions of Rest Is Resistance: A Manifesto by Tricia Hershey and related content from Hershey’s Nap Ministry :
“Exhaustion will not save us. Rest will.
“We must believe we are worthy of rest. We don’t have to earn it. It is our birthright. It is one of our most ancient and primal needs.
“Productivity should not look like exhaustion. The concept of laziness is a tool of the oppressor. A large part of your unraveling from capitalism will include becoming less attached to the idea of productivity and more committed to the idea of rest as a portal to just be.
“You are worthy of rest. We don’t have to earn rest. Rest is not a luxury, a privilege, or a bonus we must wait for once we are burned out. I hear so many repeat the myth of rest being a privilege and I understand this concept and still deeply disagree with it. Rest is not a privilege because our bodies are still our own, no matter what the current systems teach us.
“I am in awe at what our bodies can hold. We must lighten our loads. Survival is not the end goal for liberation. We must thrive. We must rest.
“Along with stealing your imagination and time, grind culture has stolen the ability for pleasure, hobbies, leisure, and experimentation. We are caught up in a never-ending cycle of going and doing.”
While Dr. Dalton-Smith, a black physician, ties rest to our physical, psychological, and spiritual well-being, Ms. Hershey, a black liberation theologian and activist, anchors her understanding of rest on liberation from capitalism, grind culture, and the colonization of bodies–especially black, brown, and female bodies. While their focuses are different, both women take rest–and our need for it in 2023–seriously.
The knowledge that rest is crucial for well-being is nothing new, of course. We all know that 8 hours of sleep a night is optimal–except there’s really a range within which individual sleep needs vary. The importance of rest beyond the physical benefits of sleep, has also long been known. I first learned the acronym HALT during my internship thirty years ago. Participants in 12 Step programs know that being Hungry, Angry, Lonely or Tired are danger points, that when they recognize the signs of one or more of these conditions they need to immediately tend to their selfcare, to lessen the chance of engaging in the addictive behavior. And of course the concept of Sabbath–a rest from work every seven days, a rest for the land every seven years–is ancient. But there seems to be a new urgency to calls for rest. Maybe it is a trend without legs or substance but maybe it is a response to something deep and troubling about this moment in time.
Laptop computers and the internet transformed the ease and quality of work that can be done away from an office. Then the explosive proliferation of cell phones magnified the blurring of the distinction between work hours and leisure hours a thousand-fold. Then along came the pandemic further muddling work time and personal time and family time–along with everything else. Now we hear stories–or experience them ourselves–of bosses and supervisors who expect responses to texts within minutes, round the clock. Stories of the professional perils of not complying with such demands and the personal perils of complying with them. There have always been people who took work home with them or on vacation–whether by choice or by expectation. In addition, interns and residents at hospitals and associates at large law firms have all worked notoriously long shifts–often at the expense not just of their physical life and their family life but also at times endangering patients. But the phones we carry in our pockets and handbags–or never even let out of our hands–our phones make almost all of us available to the demands of work 24 hours a day, if we allow it. Add in economic uncertainty persisting from the pandemic, and few of us feel secure enough to let the call go to voicemail or leave the text unanswered outside of business hours. White collar workers are subject to grind culture via cellphone. And Zoom. And Google Meets.
Other classes of workers have been subject to grind culture much longer, by means of wage theft, mandatory overtime, company stores, no or unlivable minimum wages, inadequate labor protection laws, threat of deportation, and so on. There is no time to rest body and soul because job security is often scarce and paying the bills is a moveable goal–less achievable all the time.
The simple reality that such conditions–of white collar employment, skilled and so-called unskilled manual labor, service industry jobs–is bad for our bodies and bad for our souls, shouldn’t seem revolutionary. But we’ve gone along with it so long, and allowed the powers of capitalism to pit us against one another with the threat of not enough of anything to go around, that the idea that we not only need rest but are worthy of rest, that rest is a means of resistance and a tool of liberation, this idea, this reality, is revolutionary, even subversive. And the fact that black women are at the forefront of calls to reclaim rest, speaks to the history of whose bodies and souls have been deemed least worthy of rest, and still are.
When I searched for rest poems Wendell Berry’s The Peace of Wild Things (# 483 in the back of our gray hymnal) came up again and again:
“When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.”
Research abounds into the healthful benefits of the kind of rest Berry describes–sometimes called Forest Bathing, after a Japanese practice. It can reduce the production of stress hormones, lower heart rate and blood pressure, and boosts the immune system. And these benefits aren’t dependent on a total immersion in a forest or on the shore or in a meadow or march such as the term “bathing” suggests. Simply looking at trees brings similar results. Resting in the grace of the world is good for us, body and soul.
But listen again to what the people in the crowd sourced poem said about napping:
“I would like to pause just for a few precious moments to calm my mind to slide from my world of lists and piles of laundry, of last night's dishes in the sink
“I would like to be asleep. In my bed. Unable to access the dread in my head
“We are no longer curious We are no longer present.
“I would like to give in to the pull of my eyelids Begging to close But the email in front of me Deserves a reply So I sigh deeply and shrug Resisting their tug And attempt once again To compose
“I would like to, but I can't right now. Too much to do, not the right time. I have work to do, Places to be
“Exhausted, zombies roaming the streets Toiling with no end in sight We work to eat We eat to live We live to work
I would like to rest my heart From the daily stabs of an unkind world.”
Though the prompt was napping, the desires that poets express are for a kind of relief, a kind of rest, that no amount of lying in a hammock or curling up on a couch or snuggling into bed for 20 minutes or an hour can provide. Mixed in among the dream imagery are cries for liberation from grind culture. The problem with seeking to lie down where the wood drake rests (or in a similar natural setting) is that it is an individual solution to a societal problem.
I urge you, of course, to take what rest when and where you can. You are worthy of it. Nap. Say no to another commitment (even at church). Tell us you need help. Turn off your cell phone. Remove your work email from your phone. Quiet quit if you have been over-functioning at work or in your volunteer commitments. Forest bath if you can; look at the tree in your yard if that’s what you can manage. Go to restquiz.com to find out which of the 7 types of rest Dr. Dalton-Smith identifies you are most in need of. Support one another in claiming our right to rest.
Beyond all that, I urge you to read Tricia Hershey’s Rest Is Resistance: A Manifesto or follow her Nap Ministry on social media. Begin to see when and how our culture uses exhaustion and overwork as tools of oppression. Begin to look for ways of supporting the rest of the people at the margins of our society–financially and with your votes and by what you ask of our lawmakers.
The labor movement was never only about living wages and worker safety. It was always also about rest. 8 hours to work. 8 hours to sleep. 8 hours to play. The three are inextricably bound–living wages pave the way for rest; worker safety protects laborers from lost wages that would then drive the need for second or third jobs; sufficient rest prevents work accidents. For most of us, our casual means of observing Labor Day have lost all connection to those roots. This Labor Day may we begin to find our way back, using rest as our entry point. For ourselves, for our neighbors, for the least among us. Because we are all worthy. Because as long as one of us is bound none of us is liberated. Because rest is resistance.
Amen.