On Rest

“every once and a while. take off your life. and rest.”

-Nayyirah Waheed

I recently returned home from Ethiopia, where I spent a beautiful two weeks with family. Over my trip, I was reflecting on the poem above from Nayyirah Waheed. I love the concept of rest as taking off one’s life; it’s one of the reasons travel appeals so much to me. Travel feels like a reset, like an opportunity to leave to better understand one’s familiar. Yrsa Daley-Ward has a poem where she says that she left only to be sure that she still loved the person, and that is often how I feel about the place I call home. James Baldwin once said that an identity is never questioned until it is menaced, another sentiment that captures how I feel about my home. Often it’s not until I think about moving that I realize how much I love my apartment, how much I enjoy living exactly where I live right now.

Even before my most recent trip abroad, this idea of rest as a leaving, even if not permanent, had taken hold of my mind. Just before Ethiopia, I traveled to New Mexico for a 4-day retreat. While there, my friend and travel companion remarked on how much that New Mexico felt like a place where it made sense to rest. He was coming from San Francisco (and I from DC), so I knew exactly what he meant. It’s not that nature is necessarily so difficult to get into from major metro cities; from DC, Maryland and Virginia are both right there and quite easily accessible. But it’s the spirit of a place, its very ethos, that often frowns upon rest as mindless activity, a senseless use of time when there are more things to be done and more work to be accomplished.

In my day-to-day in Ethiopia, I found rest in the fact that I had very few decisions to make. It’s not for nothing that Ethiopians are famed for their hospitality. My family made sure that I wanted for nothing; I didn’t have to make decisions about what to eat, where to go, what to do, nothing. I experienced a form of rest in freedom from decision-making. There were definitely moments of frustration at being treated like a child, but all told, children have it made. No decision-making was a situation I could abide for exactly two weeks and not much longer. Upon my return home, I found myself thinking about the forms of rest that energize me, despite the tasks of day-to-day household management once again being on my shoulders.

Rest can be a place, but it doesn’t have to be. I firmly believe in the saying that “Everywhere you go, there you are.” Drop me down in paradise and I will still be the same me, flaws, triggers, history, dreams, and all. And so I find myself on the other end of two trips, both restful in different ways, wondering how to keep the spirit of my time away with me. I don’t want to create a life that I need regular escape from; instead, I choose to create a life with regular pockets of paradise within it. That will include regular intervals of rest. Nothing in nature blooms all year round, and I am well-served to remember the same is true of myself.