Busyness is not a badge of honour. Busyness is not synonymous with worthiness. Busyness is not a status symbol. Let’s stop treating it as such.
Let’s stop making “busy” our default response to the question “how have you been?” “Busy” is not only a lazy (and boring) way of summing up our lives, but it creates an internal climate of overwhelm and perpetuates the cultural conditioning of fatigue and burnout.
You don’t need an excuse or a reason or permission to rest. You don’t owe us an explanation. You don’t need to wait until you get sick to stop. You don’t need to wait until you’re burned out to take a break.
Reclaim agency over your energy. Ride your cycles of vitality like the waves they are. Rebel against the artificial currents of urgency and importance. Rebel with a pause.
Rest is an inherent part of the natural world. All around us things ebb, flow, rise, fall, frost, melt, shine and hide. As human beings, why would be excluded from this law of nature?
Rest is rich with merit, and yet our culture has discouraged us from having it, instructing us to override our instincts and instead push forward in a perpetual hustle. We’ve gone so far as to turn busyness into a badge of honour and twist rest into a source of shame.
But that’s a losing proposition. We’re overriding our natural rhythms instead of embracing their wisdom. When we should be rising and falling like the seasons and the moon and the tides, we’re burning ourselves out, buzzing and flickering erratically like a cheap neon light.
We’ve forgotten how to rest. In fact, many of us are downright scared of rest. And yet, without rest, we can’t really do, be or achieve our best.
So let’s reclaim rest, shall we? Because busyness is not a badge of honour and we all do our best when we let ourselves have a little rest.
