U/B 7: Rest is required
For humans, cows, cats, and creativity
Here’s your weekly reminder to return to what is useful and beautiful.
Hi!
This week’s letter is late, short, and a reminder that you won’t always be operating at 100% and that’s ok. Which seems obvious. But we live in a culture that celebrates hard work and hustle, so I feel the need to say it. You are not a machine.
I just woke up from a 4-hr nap. Which I guess is more of a sleep than a nap.
This the 3rd time this week that I’ve fallen asleep in the middle of the day. The cats are thrilled.
Exhaustion is a common side effect of radiation for breast cancer. I’m almost done with the daily treatments, so I’ll get my full workday back as well as some energy.
Lots of people have anxiety around not getting enough done, not maximizing productivity. They bustle about, always busy. I understand the drive. Action is what makes progress. But action can also just be busywork if not bookended with periods of thinking and reflection.
It makes me tired just thinking about it. Did I mention I just woke up from a nap?
Humans needs rest. Not only the body. Our brains need idle time to meander. It’s common for creative ideas to happen in the shower or on a leisurely walk. Just because you cannot see or measure it, doesn’t mean there is not work being done.
There’s a great story about invisible productivity in the weird and amazing book Orbiting the Giant Hairball by Gordon MacKenzie. In the chapter What you don’t see is what you get, MacKenzie imagines a dairy business with “a rotund gentleman in a power-blue pinstripe suit” getting upset as he watches the cows standing around in the field doing nothing. “Get to work, you slackers!”
The cow… in the pasture, seemingly idle, but, in fact, performing the alchemy of transforming grass into milk.
A management obsessed with productivity usually has little patience for the quiet time essential to profound creativity. Its dream of dreams is to put the cows on the milking machine 24 hours a day. Crazy? It is happening in workplaces all over the country.
And so I work for myself now.
Anyway, this week’s rest is less about creativity than healing, though I have woken up with new ideas and a few insights. There are upsides to downtimes.
Thanks for being here.
Love,
Kate
p.s. Will you help find the 1,000 people who manifested me? Is that weird? Maybe. Still… there’s something, someone, drawing me to this work.