REST
is the conversation between what we love to do and how we love to be.
Rest is the essence of giving and receiving. Rest is an act of
remembering, imaginatively and intellectually but also physiologically
and physically. To rest is to give up on the already exhausted will as
the prime motivator of endeavor, with its endless outward need to reward
itself through established goals. To rest is to
give up on worrying and fretting and the sense that there is something
wrong with the world unless we are there to put it right; to rest is to
fall back literally or figuratively from outer targets and shift the
goal not to an inner static bulls eye, an imagined state of perfect
stillness, but to an inner state of natural exchange.
The
template of natural exchange is the breath, the autonomic giving and
receiving which is the basis and the measure of life itself. We are
rested when we are a living exchange between what lies inside and what
lies outside, when we are an intriguing conversation between the
potential that lies in our imagination and the possibilities for making
that internal image real in the world; we are rested when we let things
alone and let ourselves alone, to do what we do best, breathe as the
body intended us to breathe, to walk as we were meant to walk, to live
with the rhythm of a house and a home, giving and taking through cooking
and cleaning. When we give and take in this easy foundational way we
are closest to the authentic self, and closest to that self when we are
most rested. To rest is not self indulgent, to rest is to prepare to
give the best of ourselves, and perhaps, most importantly, arrive at a
place where we are able to understand what we have already been given.
©2013 David Whyte
Excerpted from REST From the upcoming book of essays CONSOLATIONS: The
Solace, Nourishment and Underlying Meaning of Everyday Words.
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