rest is not a luxury

!! don't read what's below !! take a rest first 🐚

often our nervous systems are too wired to come down on their own. these practices gently shut down the command board and bring us into sleep or so-called non-sleep deep rest. working with our nervous systems is also an excellent companion to this (see brain).

but, yea, we all know it's not as simple as just take a chill pill, listen to this track, 'just get some rest' (or god forbid the dutch doctor's only available prescription: paracetamol and rest), and it's all good hunni.

it's not all good. our immediate conditions are grinding. the work ahead is hard, the work ahead can feel impossible. it will probably not be done in our lifetimes.

decolonizing our minds and our movements and ultimately our societies will mean doing away with urgency culture, the productivist paradigm and exhaustion/output as a measure of worth, as a badge of honour. and we are structurally set up to be exhausted; not only due to ever-spiralling external conditions demanding more time, more labour, more you to make ends meet, but the internal drivers these environments have cultivated. the knowledge that our existence alone is enough to be worthy of acceptance and security has been drowned out.

how are we gonna get free if we're fucking exhausted and burnt out?

besides fueling our acts of resistance, and making it easier to sustain our activism and bounce back from inevitable setbacks and traumas, rest is also a place from which we can generate the clarity needed to get quiet and examine how we wish to change, ourselves.

when i first encountered the idea that we cannot change the world until we change ourselves - encapsulated by Zen master Thich Nhat Hahn's maxim "the way out is in", i reasoned it away; the systems of violence, the corporate overlords, kleptocrats and extractive capitalists and the vast swaths of upper-middle class racist, zombie consumers, aren't they the problem? they've gotta change first. i'm out here on the streets doing my part.

well, yes. but each one of us is a product of various cultural ills, and we reproduce harm, often unconsciously, or even despite our best efforts. in the violent ways we treat ourselves, in our prioritization of personal safety and accumulation above others. systemic harm is a fractal of all the harm done at individual and interpersonal levels. we reproduce harm every time we consciously or unconsciously choose to look away or stay silent about injustice.

so how do we get free of (what Ayesha Khan calls) the cop, capitalist and colonizer (the 3C's) in our minds? a long road of inner and outer work; the work of knowing and caring for ourselves; of growing through struggle; of being in radical (as in from the root) relationship to all around you; of allowing space from all the chaos - all the competition for our attention, the cacophany of inner and outer voices - and attending to what's there.

part of the reason i balked at "change yourself to change the world" is that 'self-work', and rest in particular, clearly is a luxury. i mean, it's also not, in the same way poetry is not a luxury, in the sense that rest is a prerequisite for liberation, and especially when you are not able -bodied. "change yourself to change the world" ignores the very real material conditions the global majority find themselves in. we gotta sell our bodies and time for the means of survival. many literally cannot rest because it means starvation or loss of shelter or the possible death or loss of dependents. and this is the structural violence we fight to dismantle until we are all free.

"change yourself to change the world" also smells suspiciously of territory where one can spiritually by-pass or avoid engagement. around the beginning of the genocide i started to hear claims of "i'm not political, so i don't get involved" in a totally new light, especially when they were coming from people who i knew who had some kind of spiritual/connection to nature-tilt and/or were otherwise very intent on personal transformation.

"i'm not political" is screaming code for "my rights are secure so i can't be bothered to sacrifice for someone else's". this positioning is yet another manifestation of our fundamental disconnect from all of life - humans and other - and is another form of soul-death that occurs when we deny the existence of violence or prevent ourselves from feeling the pain of the world (see Maybe madness & illness are the only way to remain human under capitalism and The Joyful lament: on Pain for the World).

a true coming back to ourselves, as i understand it, is where we can feel a truth that this society does everything to prevent us from hearing, and that is our inter-connectedness with all that is; the knowledge that because the planet is ill, i am ill - that because others suffer, a part of me dies too. a willingness to actually feel this pain and break under it means that we have no choice but to act on behalf of all. when we do this, we are dangerous.

adrienne maree brown reminds us that the first step to reclaiming our sovereignity is to have sovereignity over what we do with our own attention. this is the first step to abolishing the 3 C's in our mind. and this is quite impossible to do while exhausted.

so for those of us who can afford to rest, we can and we must; in between decisive and clear-intentioned action to organise, to block, to boycott, to bring down, to learn, to feed, to hold, to burn down (instead of burning out).

first step is to rest. and then, when meditation just isn't possible for our particular nervous system, breathe.

i believe that we will win x