REST: A SILENCE IN THE MUSIC

I’m guessing it’s not new to you that most of us have a hard time getting enough rest.

It’s one of those things we know is crucial to health and well-being but it's on our list of priorities somewhere between getting more exercise and cutting back on sugar. We might even draw a blank trying to come up with how we rest.

To be clear, by rest I don't mean collapsing into a comatose state of sleep for 6 or 8 hours after going all out, getting ready to go at life and responsibilities again. Sleep can be restful, but it's not always.

I started thinking about the mysteries of rest after listening to an episode of The Decibel, a podcast produced by the Globe and Mail called “The case for prioritizing rest in the age of burnout”. And yes, virtually everybody agrees most of us don’t get enough of it.

It’s not that I heard anything I disagreed with, the presentation was informative and all that, but at the same I was left unsatisfied. The podcast rightly pointed out that the work ethic is so intrinsic to our worldview that rest is, at its core, wasteful, and those who succumb to it run the risk of being judged as lazy and self-indulgent. It also questioned whether rest is a matter of concern only to the privileged - those with enough education and income and therefore security to carve out time to indulge.

But the podcast didn't consider what rest actually is, or could or should be.

Indeed, since the early 20th century a concern of philosophers and other thinkers about such things is that the proliferation of technology since the industrial revolution in general has transformed the human being into a resource that is intrinsically about efficiency and productivity. Rest, being essentially unproductive and inefficient, is generally frowned upon by the successful.

But there are other ways to look at rest that can free us from the "you can rest when you're dead" mantra.

Consider the word in the context of music.

The rest is “an interval of silence of a specified duration.” So says the Oxford Dictionary. And musical notation identifies a rest as “the character or sign denoting such an interval.”

That means, if you read musical notation, the interval of silence is prescribed by a symbol that dictates how long the silence, or rest, needs to be. The rest is intrinsic to the piece of music and indispensable to its rhythm and emotional expression.

Hum or sing your favourite tune. Notice the number of pauses, periods of silence. Hopefully you’ll also notice that those pauses of silence can’t be ignored, that is, if you want to experience it fully.

Of course you can sing: Yesterdayallmytroublesseemedsofarawaynowitlooksasthoughthey’reheretostayohIbelieveinyesterday… That would be efficient certainly, you get through it a lot faster, but what would the song be without the brief pauses of silence?

The point I’m making is that rest is part of the music, not a pause in it or otherwise separate from it.

Without the rest, it wouldn’t be music, just an unrelenting series of sounds.

It’s exactly the same for this human life of ours.

Rest is intrinsic to and ideally indispensable to our being-in-the-world. Rest creates a rhythm to our day, and it helps us be in touch with the here and now. It gives us a chance to connect with ourselves.

It helps us attend to our experience - our sadnesses and joys, and hopefully prevents our fears and anxieties from overwhelming us.

I can come up with examples of what practice is restful for me. But what about you?

What is your experience of rest?

What encourages the slowing and quieting of the chatter in your brain and soothes the anxious tension in your gut - or your shoulders or behind your eyes, or in your jaw, even for a few moments?

What is it that creates a stillness that nourishes the rhythm in your day, in contrast to the unrelenting busyness and unavoidable stressors that can overwhelm you,

Your experience of rest is the silence in the music that is your life.