On the beauty in the break
This is a written excerpt of Rest & Recreation, a companion to Routines & Ruts conversations podcast. Each week, host Madeleine Dore shares reflections from previous interviews and interesting reads to offer you a moment of R&R. Listen on Apple iTunes, Spotify and others.
Words by Madeleine Dore
The street artist Banksy once said, “If you get tired learn to rest, not to quit”
It might sound counterintuitive, but taking breaks and finding rest is what helps us continue on. Yet we can often resist them, or feel guilty for taking them.
Maybe that’s because breaks tend to have two sides. We can feel the loss and grief of say a broken heart, but we also seek the rejuvenating break of a holiday.
A break can be both what disorients us, and what also what sustains us.
This can occur on a micro-level. In my DIY workbook for a three hour work session, the break is really what made the focus possible—taking a 15-minutes break in between 45-minute focus work periods teaches us to pause, to refresh, to keep momentum. But these breaks can also feel uncomfortable—we might resist interrupting our flow or feel unease doing nothing, so we overlook it. When we repeat this on a larger scale day after day, we can teetering on the edge of burnout.
It can be difficult to stop when we are in flow, and we might resent our downtime or feel guilty about doing nothing—but it can actual sustain the flow.
Taking a break and finding rest isn’t inherently lazy or slothful, but we might have lingering beliefs that it is. This notion that clicked into place in my recent conversation with psychotherapist and author Hilary Jacobs Hendel. She spoke about how much we feel ease or resistance towards rest can link to how doing nothing was framed when we were growing up, but we can change that story.
If you struggle with feeling guilty for resting or want to flip the narrative that equates rest with laziness, it might be helpful to zoom in on the benefits of rest. In an interactive project titled Re-, designer Molly Grover explores five physiological and psychological processes that occur during periods of rest—it helps us recharge, reflect, restore, remove, and recover. As Molly writes:
"To acknowledge that we, as humans, have limits, challenges the values of productivity, efficiency and alertness on which such an economy is built. However, rest is indispensable to both our physical and mental wellbeing. Periods in which work is ceased provide spaces for life to exist outside the parameters of productivity. Rather than an optional leftover activity, rest constitutes a crucial opportunity to recharge our energy, reflect on our thoughts, restore our focus, remove what is unwanted and recover our equilibrium."
If you struggle with finding time for rest, it might also be worth tuning into your style of rest. For example, I’m a scattered rester. Working mostly as a freelancer, I don’t have a set routine so my days are a mix of rest and focus—perhaps other freelancers or those whose job blurs into their favourite leisure activities can relate to this variety. I wake up at varying times, I nap, I take entire days off. I’ll find myself leisurely going about day on a Wednesday, but then I might work late into a Friday evening or rise on a Sunday to write. I take scattered moments of rest and idleness between spurts of focussed work, day by day, week by week—my days are half holidays, half work and I’m learning not to judge myself for what my day looks like.
But perhaps you prefer to have a set day of rest—something we’ve lost as our weekends become crowded or everyday feels the same during the pandemic. Or you might be someone who has long stretches of work, for months and months and takes a vacation, a season break or an entire year long sabbatical.
If you’re feeling too busy to rest, then it might be helpful to view a break as the very thing that provides us with a thread to keep going. As Hemingway said:
“I learned never to empty the well of my writing, but always to stop when there was still something there in the deep part of the well, and let it refill at night from the springs that fed it. I always worked until I had something done, and I always stopped when I knew what was going to happen next. That way I could be sure of going on the next day.”
While that’s specific to the writing process, I’ve applied it as an analogy to running, to life-admin tasks, to almost anything, so perhaps you can too—stop while the going is good, so you can keep going.
And if you’re find yourself at a lost during take a break, perhaps it’s important to remember rest or a break isn’t always simply doing nothing. Rest actually provides the space for recreation—it gives us space to think creatively, and to tap into what we want to do, not what we feel we have to.
Remember how I spoke about how we’re actually a lot like sponges in last week’s mini episode? Sometimes you need to do nothing but absorb inspiration. But you can’t sit and absorb too long or it soon becomes inertia. So, like a sponge, you also need the squeeze – you need the doing, the action, the outpouring of inspiration.
Taking the break is giving room inspiration. Moments of rest or daydreaming create space to make novel connections. It can also be where we make the most progress—that flash of insight, that big aha moment, that’s priceless.
As poet May Sarton once wrote:
"Everything that slows us down and forces patience, everything that sets us back into the slow circles of nature, is a help.”
So find the beauty in the break. Be okay with what is left undone. Sustain your work by sustaining yourself. You have to breathe in to breathe out. Allow yourself to rest, pause, ponder, daydream. Be still. Listen, watch, reflect, and embrace the possibilities of idleness.