🌑 Rest in End Times
Wondering about the state and practice of rest in these end times.
How do you rest when the world you took for granted is crumbling?
When you feel like you have to keep going because if you stop, everything will catch up with you, and you will have to pause and think about the things you are trying to run away from.
When you feel like AI will make you redundant if you don’t learn the latest tool fast enough and increase your output.
When you feel like you could miss the start of yet another war if you stop paying attention to the news, even for just a couple of days.
When you feel like you’re letting the “bad guys” win if you stop being angry, worried, engaged for a minute.
When you feel like you’re never doing enough or making the right choices, no matter how hard you try.
When you feel like you’ll fall in a deep, dark pit of depression if you acknowledge all the injustices and open yourself to the collective pain of humanity.
Any of these sound familiar?
So you keep going, even though you know you should stop. You keep going, even though the few people still close to you look at you with concern. Or maybe they’re also too tired to check in on you.
You keep coming back to AI assistants for assistance, despite the guilt over their environmental impact. You rarely say please and thank you to ChatGPT these days because you are barely able to maintain functional human relations, let alone consider the possible feelings of the chatbot you fear could do your job better than you.
We are using the pronoun “you” here, but we’re actually talking about ourselves and how exhausted we’ve both been feeling this past lunation. But we also feel we are not alone with these feelings as we watch other people around us lose hope, lose joy, lose their spark, shut down, close in, become more conservative and fearful.
We’re exhausted, but how do we rest when we’ve got thousands of reasons not to? Thousands of reasons to scream and shout, to run, to hide, to do anything but rest.
And resting means focusing more on being than doing. Being at rest can be hard. Precisely because we live in bodies that are never truly still while alive. We use language like “recharge” or “unplug”, as if we were appliances that could simply sit in a corner until recharged or needed.
We can never fully unplug from the web of life we are a part of. No matter how hard we try to convince ourselves that we are more than, better than, smarter than, more deserving than... We are just a tiny blip in the history of our species, our lives defined and shaped by chance and stories we choose to believe more than we like to admit.
Like the story of time. We simultaneously make choices as if we had all the time in the world – to stop messing with the climate, for instance –, yet are also too afraid to take a day off, lest we get left behind.
Rather than coming to a full stop, perhaps rest in these end times is more about shifting perspective.
Sometimes the different perspective can be found under a cosy blanket from which you’re hiding from the world. Sometimes it can be found in a forest or any other place where you can get away from the constant noise of modern life and vehicles endangering your life at every turn. Sometimes it is revealed when checking up on friends and finding time to conspire – from Latin conspirare, literally “to breathe together” – together. Sometimes it appears in the rhythm of washing dishes at the end of a long day. Sometimes it emerges as you allow your body to shimmy to the beat of a song and end up in an energetic primal dance. Sometimes it can be found in a home-cooked meal you share with others. Sometimes at a protest where you take a stand for somebody else and use your privilege to speak up.
The different perspective isn’t necessarily about finding another angle to overintellectualise your fear and anxiety from. Rest seems to be more about remembering how to be human, together, than coming to a full stop. Less doing, but more being.
Lately, we have been rather poor at following this advice in our own lives. Mat has been trying to teach MBA students about business transformation in a more embodied way, while Alja has been trying to encourage teachers to think beyond content and showing them ways of creating spaces for learning. We have both been doing a lot, way more than our doing is valued at, because it appears we still believe in trying. Or at least in the power of modelling other ways of doing. Or perhaps we find it just as hard to let go as everyone else.
So this is a reminder for ourselves just as much as for you, whoever you are, reading these lines. Perhaps the only you who still have time and energy left to read these lines are web crawlers, on a mission to procure fresh data for the hungry AI models.
But if you are indeed a human – don’t worry, we won’t make you take a test to prove your humanity –, let this be your permission, your invitation to actually being human. To rest in whatever way makes sense to you. To find rest in community.
So that together we can be and become the change we want to see in the world. Because we cannot afford to let the emotionally immature men in charge be the only model of leadership while we continue our collective rush towards the cliff.
With 💜 & 🙂 from the Tethix campfire,
Alja and Mat
Additional pathfinding suggestions
This New Moon, we invite you to …
📚 … read the book series Rest Is Resistance by Tricia Hersey.
💜 … listen to the latest episode of Pathfinders Podcast How might we stop role-playing as machines?
🔥 … join us for the next Full Moon Gathering for a yarn on rest.
