I was invited by The Possibility Project to talk about “rest as resistance” earlier this year, and it seemed important to revisit this topic at the start of summer as we attempt to slow down. Here’s how the event was billed:
“In our dominant culture’s focus on hustle, grinding, progress, and productivity, where and how do we focus on rest? What does ‘rest as resistance’ really mean and how does rest connect to justice and liberation? We want to talk about the systems and structures that construct harmful expectations and behaviors and discuss how we all can reclaim our power to change how we live, work, and play.” (See link to recording below.)
So I had to first figure out what I know (and don’t know) about rest. In my preparation, I decided ultimately – and simply – that I had to be honest about my own clumsy journey to untangle myself from grind culture and what I observe in my intimate relationships, with my clients, and in my community.
When I left my “big job” in 2019, six months after my mother died, I knew I needed rest. Not only did I have this big grief to maneuver around, I also knew that there was some profound intergenerational healing work ahead of me. I didn’t know how to balance this with the day-to-day demands and responsibilities of a higher profile nonprofit job. Death is the most final of finalities that we humans can experience, and I knew that my mother’s death had opened up opportunities to examine everything in my life, including the so-called “work-life balance.”
What I learned as I started my own consultancy practice was that resisting the inbox or the Slack messages or the family text thread required me to confront strong feelings and hard truths about myself – people pleasing, my savior complex, workaholism, self-worth, lack of boundaries, unhealed traumas, and ultimately, my own sense of powerlessness and hopelessness in certain difficult situations.
The truth is, five years later, I’m still not sure I know how to rest. Tricia Hersey’s work at The Nap Ministry and her book, Rest as Resistance: A Manifesto, has been seminal for more people to understand the impact of capitalism’s grind culture, particularly on people and women of color. I’m also really clear that Hersey’s work was not initially for me as a middle class, educated white woman. A certain level of class privilege enshrines a “right to recreate,” or pride in not working, which includes the consumerism of self-care, “treat yourself” fashion, travel, and wellness. Meanwhile, labor exploitation affects people at all “levels” of the extractive machine that is in service to wealth accumulation, but one that is disproportionately impacting women of color.
This has very real implications for people’s overall health. My fellow discussant, Desiree Adaway, spoke to the persistent racial, ethnic, and gender disparities in sleep duration. Karen Lincoln PhD, of the Univ. of California Irvine explains, “Sleep tends to be socially patterned – we often observe, poor, disrupted, and irregular sleep patterns among those in lower socioeconomic positions, including shift work, and long hours that contribute to chaotic and irregular sleeping conditions. African-Americans [and Latino immigrants] are often concentrated in low-skilled and low-paying jobs, with very little control and flexibility in their schedules. The effects of noise, light, traffic, air, pollution, crime, and discrimination – which are socially patterned by neighborhood – on sleep outcomes have been well documented.” So at the core of our conversations about rest has to be a respect for bodies – all bodies – in recognition that systems of oppression succeed in separating all of us from our humanness.
What I had to learn after choosing my own health and wellbeing was much harder than the choice itself. I had to re-learn how to follow my own instinct and intuition – to follow my desires, and to understand that as a political choice, but ultimately as a return to being human.
Rest is also a political choice for me because its cumulative or collective impact is that there’s no room or space or energy for anything to change. Maintaining a sense of urgency in my work is a preservation of the status quo. It depletes what I need to dream, to perceive more possibilities.
In the nonprofit sector, I will sing it from the rooftops for the rest of my career if I need to:
Most of us are moving at an unsustainable pace.
The need, the suffering we are responding to is growing, is pressing, and is undeniable. We can’t stop AND we can’t do everything. And so our teams have to learn to trust each other and to rely on each other to be able to slow down and speed up as necessary – in response to a changing world. When we are recovering, rather than resting, we are only ever returning to continue business as usual. Rest includes spaciousness – time to not only recover our energy, but to reflect, wonder, and play.
Prioritizing our rest means “the plan” can no longer be the only way we shape our work. Hierarchical organizations rely on assumptions of subordination to get the work done. Thus, how we make, or rather don’t make, explicit agreements with each other about how and when work is done is where the system relies on the exploitation to keep happening.
To counter this effect in nonprofits, we can notice how we relate to time as scarcity and who the impact of that falls upon. How we treat each other, i.e. the demands we make of each others’ time, energy, knowledge, and attention, can be approached with much more intention, care, and consent. We can interrupt our bias for action. We can know that as we protect each others’ right to rest, we can make decisions that center the most impacted, and that de-center toxic individualism and saviorism, which is the core of a charity mindset.
Five years later, I believe we still have to take personal responsibility for our rest because our institutions and organizations largely are modeled on and still serve this global economic system built on exploitation and extraction. Ae also have to take personal responsibility for our rest because care work is also invisibilized as time is commodified. Ultimately, until another world is here, we have to carve out our own peace. No one is offering it to us – not our bosses, our family members or partners. I was socialized as a woman, so I’ve had to learn to relate to “No” as a complete sentence.
Can we pay more attention to our pace? To where our energy and attention goes? We can’t afford to stop – literally. But can we learn to pause…together?
This pause is the place of healing. In that space that we create for each other, we will find grief and rage. This pause gives us a chance to bring our disparate parts together, to reconnect, to question, to see options, to shift.
Let’s start here: What does a well-resourced team look like, in terms of human power? Do we know how to tend to that and to tend to each other?
These are not new questions but I do believe they are necessary for our survival.
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Recommended Books
- Rest as Resistance: A Manifesto, by Tricia Hersey
- How to do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy, by Jenny Odell
- Stolen Focus: Why You Can’t Pay Attention – and How to Think Deeply Again, by Johann Hari
- Hospicing Modernity: Facing Humanity’s Wrongs and the Implications for Social Activism, by Vanessa Machado de Oliveira
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