The Rest We Don’t Let Ourselves Have

You're waiting for a bus. It will arrive in seven minutes. Nothing has changed on the display, but you've checked the time for the third time already. You shift from one foot to the other, tense up, and look down the same stretch of road. Seven minutes later, the bus arrives. None of those actions made it come any faster.

That doesn't mean waiting is easy. If you're running late, or someone is waiting for you, you have a real reason to be concerned. You can let the person know, change your route, or choose another way to get there. Those are actions that may make a difference. But once you've taken the actions available to you, a question remains. What is the rest of your tension doing?

Call devotes a whole chapter to different forms of rest. Her observation is an unusual one. Rest doesn't happen only when we've deliberately scheduled it. Sometimes life has already given us a pause, but we don't let ourselves enter it.

She describes a passenger rushing to catch a train who hires a carriage. The horses are running. The driver is driving. Yet the passenger sits there so tense that you would think he still had to pull the carriage forward himself. He feels as though he's taking part in something urgent. In fact, his contracted muscles aren't adding to the horses' speed.

Our present-day passenger might sit in a taxi, mentally pushing every car in front of him. If the driver needs the address or a detail about where to turn, that participation is useful. But if the driver already knows the way and traffic has stopped at a light, the passenger's inner pushing doesn't make anything move faster.

An uncomfortable feeling can arise here. If I stop being tense, it's as if I'm agreeing to be late. As if I'm admitting that I don't care. So we keep the tension as a sign of responsibility.

But responsibility is already present in choosing an action you can take and letting someone know you'll be delayed. The extra gripping doesn't make you more considerate toward the person who's waiting. You can take the situation seriously without trying to operate the traffic light with your jaw.

The same contradiction can appear in the room where we're resting. Call asks whether we're holding ourselves on the chair, or letting the chair hold us. We can read this as a question about unnecessary holding, rather than an exact posture or one rule for how everyone should sit. She's interested in the effort that continues when support is already there.

Here's a familiar picture. Someone lies down, but their head seems to hover over the pillow. Their legs stay tense. Their mind keeps checking whether the rest has produced a result yet. Even taking a break has become work with a plan for immediate success.

Call writes about sleep too. Her specific explanations of what happens at night belong to her time. Her promises aren't a treatment for insomnia. We'll take a more cautious question from this chapter. During the day, am I continuing to hold myself ready for work even when I've already allowed myself a pause?

There's no need to force your thoughts to stop right now. Call herself observes that demanding an immediate end to thinking may not help, especially when you're already agitated. Checking every thought can turn your attention back toward the very thing you're fighting.

You can begin with something available that doesn't require you to win a battle. You're sitting. There is support underneath you. Do your arms need to stay braced as if they're still carrying packages? Perhaps they don't. This isn't an order to fall asleep or a promise that anxiety will disappear. It's a small distinction between what is happening now and being ready for something that might happen later.

There's another important detail. Calm shouldn't make us less aware of our circumstances. At the bus stop, you need to notice the bus. During a ride, the driver may need an answer. We're talking about resting within a safe situation, rather than disconnecting from the world.

Rest can also be difficult because we expect a pause to make us feel energetic again immediately. You sit down for a few minutes and are already judging the result. It's as if rest were an employee who's late delivering an order. But that checking keeps us close to the task we thought we'd set aside.

We could look at the same wait another way. Right now, I don't need to add pressure to something I can't speed up. These minutes don't have to solve every problem. They can simply pass without more pushing. That may be a very small benefit. But it's already different from spending seven minutes constantly trying to bring the bus here by sheer force of waiting.

A pause won't always feel pleasant. You might let go of the extra readiness in your arms and still feel tired or worried. That isn't a failure. Rest doesn't have to prove its usefulness every moment. And fatigue doesn't prove that you're relaxing incorrectly.

For our passenger, the traffic hasn't changed. His participation in it has. He's stopped doing work that existed only in his tension. When it's time to get out, find the platform, and walk, his effort will have a clear purpose again.

Now let's look for something similar in mental work. We can understand a difficult idea. Or we can use our whole body to show how attentively we're trying to understand it. How do we tell the difference?