“You never rest.” – Ben Folds Five, Battle of Who Could Care Less
There’s a lot of pushing going on in my life lately. It’s the good kind of pushing, but it’s still pushing. And when you’ve got a lot of it going on, you tend to get tired easier. Your constitution also gets compromised if you don’t stop pushing every once in a while to…well…rest.
Mine was compromised since last Thursday night.
I felt it coming home from CREATIVEMIX. I knew it was going to take up camp here for a few days. Today it has less strength than I do, but the days prior to that it had strong-armed me with little difficulty.
It’s when you’re sick that you really have a chance to look at the important stuff you’ve been letting slide. You know, the stuff that are basic simple pleasures that you’ve not given yourself the time to really spend time “in” and not just “on”.
This weekend, I watched the Bengals win another football game. Yet unlike weeks’ before, I didn’t do anything else while watching them play. I just watched and enjoyed. Win or lose, it was great to be spending time in an activity that I enjoy.
I also watched some television for the first time in months without having another thing on the go while doing so. It may not have been terribly productive, but it was relaxing and required little effort on my part.
Spending time in these things over the weekend made me value the former a lot more and realize that I wasn’t missing all that much from not doing the latter all that often anymore. I also got some much-needed rest, which put me in a position to write this piece and the other two I wrote earlier today. I’m also that much more prepared for tomorrow because I’m coming out of an unhealthy spell.
There was reward in the rest. Rest — unencumbered rest — creates a sense of perspective that a simple break doesn’t. Same with a vacation. Those are either too brief or too planned. The kind of rest I had was the result of having something thrust upon me that I really didn’t want. And the perspective I got from the rest is that I discovered how valuable the stuff I do want is and how much value I placed on things that I used to do was higher than it should have been.
I’m glad I got the rest. I’m more glad that I was given it well after the Bengals bye week.
