“I work to drive the awe away, yet awe impels the work.” –Emily Dickinson
I am carrying these words from Emily Dickinson, one of my favorite poets, into 2021 with me. This quote has always rung so true when it comes to the writing process. It is also a theme when I consider what this new year could be. A new year always brings the feeling of a fresh start, and with that, the desire to do more. Resolutions, changing behavior, turning over a new leaf, learning something new. But, at the same time, after the year we just had, what if we come into 2021 doing less?
There are two seemingly paradoxical ideas I am holding here in 2021: do the damn thing, and do, well, nothing. After thinking about starting a newsletter for over a year, I told myself, Do the damn thing. But throughout a year that we can all categorically agree was a blazing trash fire—racism, covid, natural disasters—I also kept telling myself, Stop. Stop trying to fill up this time with stuff. Stop trying to distract yourself from the discomfort.
2020 was a year, for me, of turning deeply inward. From a triple pandemic, to a new virtual world order, I kept noticing all the ways I was trying to distance myself from reality: Online shopping. Netflix. Doom-scrolling. Even the “productive” things I did still left me feeling empty: Working out. Reading. Signing petitions. Finishing my 200-hour yoga teacher certification. Completing a Y12SR (Yoga of 12-Step Recovery) Leadership Training. I was trying to fill every moment with something.
What was romanticized as a big “pause button” for the world, a chance for us all to breathe, was also an untenable year of insecurity. Lives and livelihoods lost, plans rendered impossible, pivots necessary. Through it all, we were encouraged to use this time to be productive. Make sourdough bread, learn a new craft, a new language. If we weren’t using this “free time” to start a new business or find a new hobby, we weren’t taking advantage of this rare moment in history. But what would we have to show for it? A half-finished painting? More stuff to add to the landfill? Certificates to hang on the wall or add to our social media handles?
I’m all for learning a new skill, reading more books, being creative, but what we’re really being sold on isn’t about pursuing creative endeavors, it’s about supporting capitalist grind culture. It’s all a big distraction. Produce more for what? For whom?
We’re all exhausted. From Zoom fatigue to compassion fatigue, media overwhelm to missing family and friends—2020 was a doozy. Who wants to do anything anymore?
A silver(ish) lining of the so-called pause was the attention that had to be paid to America’s centuries-old system: racism. The deaths of Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, George Floyd; where many could previously turn a blind eye, they could no longer turn away.
Many of us used the time to align, or realign, with what we really believe in, what we stand for.
But amidst this turmoil, amidst these calls to action, there has also been another call, one that may be difficult to hear, one that runs counter to the capitalism America has been running on since its birth: rest. We cannot fight these systems if we do not rest. We can’t affect change if we’re running on empty. Our society would have us burn out so we continue to maintain the status quo, and that is why one of the most transformational messages I heard in 2020 was from activist Tricia Hersey and her organization, The Nap Ministry: take a nap.
“Rest is a beautiful interruption in a world that has no pause button.” –The Nap Ministry
The most radical thing we can do is listen to that call for rest. Not the siren song of the attention economy, which is designed to exhaust us into inaction. To buy more and ignore the rest (sorry, can’t resist a pun). No, it is the call of fighting for what we believe in, and taking care of ourselves. Taking care of ourselves and taking care of each other. To listen to ourselves, as well as our communities. Rather than fighting and then recovering, what if recovery was integral to the fight? As Hersey says, “Organizing and activism is spiritual work. Rest and communal care is a spiritual practice.”
Rest is radical. We fight the systems designed to keep us complacent when we take the time to turn it all off. It becomes overwhelming and we sink into inertia if we keep listening to the cacophony out there, and don’t listen to ourselves and our bodies, which are begging us to disconnect from the sensory overload. Whether that is taking a nap or meditating, looking at the birds in the tree out your window or, my favorite pastime as of late, taking a hot bath with Epsom salts and essentials oils, I encourage us all to take a moment and just be. Then let’s get to work.
2020 was the worst, but there were still some highlights!
Follow: The Nap Ministry and “examine the liberating power of naps.” I found Hersey’s work on Instagram; perhaps the only good thing about social media is finding voices like hers, and other WOC, who are doing the damn thing. I was super excited to see this recent profile of Hersey in The Cut (one of my favorite media outlets).
Listen: “Get Ready” by Lady Wray. This song is from 2013, but I still had it on repeat throughout 2020. I dare you not to dance when you hear this one. I first heard Lady Wray on the soundtrack to the HBO series True Blood, where the track “Karma” made me pause the episode and immediately buy the song. (I think it was even my cellphone ringtone for a minute, back when that was a thing. I’m dating myself!)
Move: Check out Yoga by Biola’s 6-part Divine Feminine Yoga Series on YouTube for an embodied exploration of feminine power. Abiola Akanni is the founder of Trap Vinyasa in Seattle, and she created her YouTube channel, Yoga by Biola, “to bring accessible yoga and enlightenment practices to underserved and ‘othered’ communities.” I love her grounded teaching style and infectious smile.
Watch: The best movie of 2020: The 40-Year-Old Version! Writer-director-actor-rapper Radha Blank is revelatory. If you haven’t seen it yet, do as my sister told me and: Watch it now! I won’t give away the plot; all I will say is, if you don’t love this poignant and hilarious movie, you may need to get checked out by a doctor.
Read: Hood Feminism: Notes from the Women That a Movement Forgot, by Mikki Kendall. This book was mic-drop good. In a country where 55% (?!) of white women voted for Trump, it’s required reading. “If Hood Feminism is a searing indictment of mainstream feminism, it is also an invitation. . . . [Kendall] offers guidance for how we can all do better.”—NPR
A note about where I link to books, and why: I’ve created a book list for The Find on Bookshop.org, “an online bookstore with a mission to financially support local, independent bookstores,” where I’ll be sharing my favorite books. Amazon does not deserve our hard-earned money, indie bookstores and authors do! Full disclosure: I’m an affiliate with Bookshop. For every purchase from The Find’s book list, Bookshop gives 10% of the sale to independent bookstores. If you’d like find out more, please click here.
Let’s get into good trouble! See you next week.