Rest Does Not Have to Justify Itself
The culture of efficiency demands that even rest should develop you, impress people and pay for itself in photographs. Meanwhile rest without effort can be good rest, if your strength really does come back afterwards.
Sometimes a person needs a hike, a theatre, a trip or dinner with friends. Sometimes a sofa, silence and a series that develops no competency whatsoever.
The quality of rest is determined not by how much organising went into it but by what happens afterwards:
- did the energy come back;
- did the tension drop;
- was there any pleasure;
- did the rhythm change;
- did it add fatigue of its own;
- has the avoidance become permanent.
Active rest really does often produce more impressions and separates a day off from an ordinary evening better. But preparing it also spends energy. Someone who has been making decisions all week may not want to run a six-person expedition on Saturday.
Passive rest becomes a problem when it is chosen automatically and does not restore anything. Three hours of a feed can leave a person more tired than before the rest, though formally he did nothing heavy.
It is worth having several modes:
- complete stillness;
- movement;
- a change of setting;
- company;
- solitude;
- making something;
- taking in art;
- no programme at all.
Free time is under no obligation to be well spent by an external standard.
Sometimes well-organised rest is a day nobody organised.
The test is delayed: not how Sunday evening felt, but how Tuesday looks. A holiday with four cities in ten days produces plenty of shots and a feeling of richness on the spot, but on return the person spends a week getting back into work or falls ill immediately. A week in one place, half of it with no programme, leaves fewer stories and more strength. The difference is only visible over distance, so judging a holiday right after it is roughly like judging a dinner from a photograph.
The awkward part is that Tuesday converts badly into conversation. Four cities give you something to say at the coffee machine on Monday; a week in one place gives you nothing. This is where rest starts fitting itself to the future retelling rather than to the fatigue.