When to Rest

I am tired. I woke up in this little white cottage by the sea. I am sitting outside at a glass table on a green wicker chair, with a soft gray blanket draped over my lap. The sun is just starting to peek over the trees and the birds are going wild. I can hear the ocean rumbling in the distance, and there are tiny gray bunnies with little white cotton ball tails nibbling on the clover at my feet. The tree whose shade I am under is draped in a minty green moss. The air here is exquisite. But I am so damn tired.

I like to have a reason for my tiredness; I didn’t sleep well, I have been working hard, maybe it’s allergies, I have some worrisome thoughts that are nagging me… the list goes on and on. I've had a very physical past couple of weeks, that’s for sure. On top of lifting weights daily at the gym, I am teaching five yoga classes each week, and in my “free” time I am working on renovations to our house and keeping up on the garden and myriad other chores and responsibilities. I’ve recently had some concerning mammogram results which I have not yet received concrete answers on, and that undercurrent of fear is always running through me lately. I am raising a teenager. According to the nightly news, the world seems like it’s about to blow up in a million different ways. Last night I had a dream that a little alien man was standing next to my bed and he was scaring me but I couldn’t move or scream, and then I couldn’t get back to sleep afterwards. The night before last, someone on our street decided to have a fireworks show at 4 am.

These are all of my excuses and reasons, my stories about my tiredness. The mind is made to interpret all physical sensations and create thoughts about them. The mind rarely allows sensations to pass unexamined. But when I attach my tiredness to all of these explanations and mental acrobatics, I am denying my experience and even creating a place where I am liable to feel guilty about my physical feelings. What happens when I don’t think that I deserve to be tired, since I can’t seem to come up with enough reasons for it? I will not allow myself to rest when I’m tired unless I somehow feel like I truly deserve it. I must have an acceptable amount of reasons for my fatigue before I grant myself a break. How crazy is that? Why are we so endlessly hard on ourselves?

Whenever I need to work through something, or I feel myself spiraling out of control, being swept up in thoughts, I return myself to the four noble truths of Buddhism:

• The truth of suffering

• The truth of the cause of suffering

• The truth of the end of suffering

• The truth of the path that leads to the end of suffering

I am currently suffering the very real human experience of fatigue. However, my fatigue is not what is causing me to suffer. The cause of all suffering is desire; I want my tiredness to end and this fatigue to go away. My thoughts tell me that tiredness is bad (my thoughts are wrong of course), and if I listen to them then I will want for this sensation to stop. But there is a way for me to end this suffering, and that is to quit wanting for my current state to be different than it is. If I don’t see fatigue as inherently bad and wish for it to end, then I won’t be unhappy about it when it happens; it will just be another human experience, as welcome as any other.

I have spent nearly two hours now sitting under this tree, using only a slice of that time to write down these thoughts. The vast majority of this morning has been spent just looking around. I’ve watched a couple of sleek squirrels chase each other in a upside down spiral on the tree trunk. The sun has risen exponentially, the temperature has warmed a bit, a couple of very speckly birds have eaten twice their body weight in red berries, and the ferry has startled me twice now with its blaring horn as it passes through the bay. I have accomplished nothing. I've gone nowhere. I haven't even eaten yet. I'm thinking that I am even more tired now than when I first woke this morning. And that’s okay. I am releasing all of those stories, I no longer claim them. I am tired. I am going to rest.

“When an animal in the jungle is wounded, it knows how to find a quiet place, lie down and do nothing. The animal knows that is the only way to get healed—to lay down and just rest, not thinking of anything, including hunting and eating. The animal knows that it does not need to eat. What it needs is to rest, to do nothing, and that is why its health is restored.”

~Thic Nhat Hanh