All of culture is working in collaboration for us not to rest and when we do listen to our bodies and take reset, many feel extreme guilt and shame. Embrace knowing that you have been manipulated and scammed by a violent system as powerful evidence. Now with this knowledge you can grieve, repair, rest, and heal….
The idea of rest as resistance is a powerful counternarrative to the dominant story. Protest and resistance doesn't look one way. It's what's really happening on the ground in the small and important details of our lives. It says, "No, this isn't the full story. I have another perspective. I can speak for myself." It's living when someone told you you should die. It's centering joy when pain and oppression surround you daily. It's living in your truth, even when your heart trembles at the thought of being vulnerable. It's napping when the entire culture calls you lazy. It's sleeping when you have been told by capitalism that you aren't doing enough. It's honoring a day, a week, a second for Sabbath. It's reimagining what a Sabbath can look like based on your own history. Resistance is laying down when you have been told to keep going.
- Disability culture says no. It’s disability community that’s helped me realize that the measure of my life is more than a simple tally of accomplishment. My work is not my worth. Living with disability, as Rabbi Elliot Kuklaobserves, “is a long, slow detox from capitalist culture and its mandate that we never rest.” -Julia Watts Belser for TRUTHOUT •
My passionate sense of social justice and social responsibility has always contrasted oddly with my pronounced lack of need for direct contact with other human beings and human communities. I am truly a 'lone traveler' and have never belonged to my country, my home, my friends, or even my immediate family, with my whole heart; in the face of all these ties, I have never lost a sense of distance and a need for solitude
Albert Einstein, Essential Einstein (ed. Pomegranate, 1995)