Rest
Pause to Ponder
Having lived most of my life at full speed, never taking a break when I was exhausted, I’m finally embracing rest, which has made my life much more pleasant. I love David Whyte’s beautiful wisdom on this important subject, excerpted from a chapter called “Rest” from his gem of a book, Consolations: The Solace, Nourishment and Underlying Meaning of Everyday Words.
Rest is the conversation between what we love to do and how we love to be…To rest is to give up on the already exhausted will as the prime motivator of endeavour, 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 not self-indulgent; to rest is to prepare to give the best of ourselves, and to perhaps, most importantly, arrive at a place where we are able to understand what we have already been given.
In the first state of rest is the sense of stopping, of giving up on what we have been doing or how we have been being. In the second is the sense of slowly coming home, the physical journey into the body’s uncoerced and unbullied self, as if trying to remember the way or even the destination itself…
Rested, we are ready for the world but not held hostage by it; rested, we care again for the right things and the right people in the right way. In rest we re-establish the goals that make us more generous, more courageous, more of an invitation, someone we want to remember, and someone others would want to remember too.
—David Whyte
Take a Moment Micro-Meditation
Tiny pauses to be right here, right now can have big results. Visit and bookmark our library of twenty Take a Moment micro-meditations—all under two minutes long—that make taking mindful pauses as easy as possible. We invite you to "Take a Moment" to find the calm that is always within you.
