Dear Diary,
I just wrote (In my Dear Diary, What is Rest piece), ‘I think of rest as being in a state of peace.’ However, I felt I was vastly understating my feelings. I couldn’t find the words to elaborate upon rest and peace. What is peace? Peace has to be one of the most challenging ideas to wrap our heads around. Intuitively, peace can be seen as the absence of stress, a reactionary statement. Stress draws our attention away from places we would instead invest into areas we’d rather not. At what point do our intentions become our control?
On the river of life, we float along in a boat of some sort. There are piers or docks throughout the river of life to load more or take some weight off our ship. Taking on more weight or lightening the boat are both acts of doing. Peace, however, is a state of being. How often do we observe the dock reaching out to us but choose not to interact with it? The more important question is how often do we let the port pass us by choice?
Pain is a fact of life, but we do not have to choose to suffer. Suffering is an emotional and mental state of constant investment in the pain source. When we go down the road of suffering, we become lost in our minds and thus no longer present in the moment. How many docks have we missed by being lost in our minds? How many of these opportunities to take some weight off our boats did we not seize? The idea behind meditation is developing the skills to wield our attention consciously. We re-train our attentions to be in the present so we may choose to react or practice non-action.
Rest is the balance of being and doing. Sometimes, we must practice meditation and focus on ‘doing’ in the moment. Other times, we must practice compassion with ourselves and ‘be.’ I, for one, tend to want to solve problems immediately and try my best to develop courses of action to enable myself to do so. The truth of the matter though, is not every problem is solvable by me, and not all of them demand I divert the course of my ship to address. Letting ourselves ‘be’ in a non-reactive state is a form of self-compassion. We can choose not to take on more and more weight until our ship sinks under pressure.
Practicing compassion for the self is a skill of its own. All skills require adequate time invested in engaging in the practice, and I regularly fail to set aside that time. I feel pressure to ‘do’ something constantly, although I frequently know not what that ‘thing’ is. In my younger days, I would start a grand project to give myself something to do, but present me knows I’ll lose interest and focus because I was practicing escapism all along. I’ve been asked frequently, “Who is telling you to do something?” I never have an answer; I just feel this pressure in my mind.
Being overly active in the pursuit of ‘doing,’ I’ve neglected my practice at ‘being.’ Practicing being non-reactive in the moment is an act of self-compassion, and I’ve historically valued myself too poorly. I find myself at a crossroads wherein I know low self-worth contributes to pain and stress, but I don’t know how to alleviate the pain sufficiently to progress in areas critical to my self-worth. Even as I write this piece of positivity, my back is screaming at me, and I’ve had to get up repeatedly to manage. The dichotomy of my mental and physical states means I’m constantly moving my attention away from pain. Any lapse in vigilance sends me down a spiral not easy from which to recover. I struggle even more to practice self-compassion in those downward spirals, which exacerbates the cycle.
It is ok to rest. It is ok to find a balance between ‘doing’ and ‘being.’ I am aware I have to unlearn this pressure to produce, to ‘do,’ so that I afford myself opportunities to relax. Currently, I tell myself I’m lazy and make excuses for myself if I’m not constantly engaged with something. This negative pressure I put on myself makes mental rest more difficult, even if I’m attempting to relax physically. Conversely, when I’m engaged and feeling better mentally, it is often at the cost of my body. I have a long way to go to learn how to engage without detriment and allow myself not to engage at all. Rest is elusive, but awareness is a big step towards a solution, and now I need to develop the skills through practice. I have much introspection to do, but I’d like to remain hopeful. Hope is, after all, the mechanism for meaning, and I’m trying my best to assign meaning to myself without needing to show a result of an action. I can have meaning by ‘being.’ One step at a time.