June 14
Rest without any activity is a grave entered alive.
Letters to Lucilius, Letter 55 (freely rendered)
Listening mode
Rest without any activity is a grave entered alive.
A day off feels different when something is waiting for you the next morning. The hours have an edge then. You know what you are resting from, and that is exactly what makes doing nothing easy.
If that edge is missing for a long while, the rest changes without your noticing it at first. You sleep longer, but not because you are tired. You put off some small thing until tomorrow, and tomorrow can hardly be told apart from today. From the outside this looks like recovery. From the inside, something is missing that is hard to name: whatever you do or leave undone hardly makes a difference any more.
Keeping busier does little against it. It can also merely drown the lack out. What is missing is more likely something that answers you: work that pushes back, a person who is expecting your call. Strangely, it often takes very little.
Then an afternoon in which you do nothing becomes once again something you take for yourself, and not something that simply happens to you.
