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2020 has been a year of many questions. One such question I’m pondering, as we turn towards the colder months: how do I balance productivity and rest? How can I learn to value internal growth and reflection as much as I value visible results?
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Chasing Productivity
Growing up, society has told us that we’re only worth as much as we achieve. It’s a convenient lie, when you think about it: “You’re not good enough…yet.” A scarcity mindset persuades us that happiness and success is something we need to buy, to work for, to chase after—something always out of reach.
In my own life, I’ve spent most my life believing my self-worth depended on my productivity. I was addicted to the feeling of achievement, and yet no matter how much I crossed off my to-do list, it wasn’t enough. Even when I tried to relax, I had a constant nagging feeling of “needing to do something.” Sound familiar?
If you believe happiness exists somewhere outside yourself, you need to strive harder and harder to chase after it. You hurry towards an elusive version of success, without ever pausing to ask yourself whether it’s really what you want. You burn yourself out, trying to maintain the impossible standard you’ve set for yourself.
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Doing vs. Being
As 2020 has unfolded, I’ve watched myself and others begin to break free of this fixed mindset—the mindset that says our value depends on productivity and efficiency and achievement. Instead, we are slowly rediscovering the value of solitude, creativity, and time with the people we love.
We’re learning to focus on being over doing. We’re restructuring our mental framework: working less, living more.
Without the slow work of growing roots deep into the earth, a plant can’t flourish. In the same way, just because you’re not making visible progress—things you can check off on a list, or post online—doesn’t mean you’re not growing as a person. Internal growth—reflection, solitude, restructuring your mindset, choosing to be grateful despite your circumstances—matters as much as, if not more than, external results or progress.
Humans are not machines. We live best when we live with the rhythms of the world—the ocean tide, the changing of seasons, the inhale and exhale of living. Summer and winter, work and rest, growth and renewal. It’s not one or the other; it’s both. We are a continual work-in-progress.
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Recovering Rhythms of Rest
Balancing productivity and rest has been a common theme since the beginning of this pandemic. When the stay-at-home order began back in March 2020, a poem by Kitty O’Meara began circulating online. Her poem posed a vision for the pandemic: what if, rather than being inconvenient, this pandemic was offering us an opportunity? A chance to step back from our hurry-obsessed lives, reevaluate, rest, and heal? What if these months could be a long deep breath?
“And the people stayed home. And read books, and listened, and rested, and exercised, and made art, and played games, and learned new ways of being, and were still. And listened more deeply. Some meditated, some prayed, some danced. Some met their shadows. And the people began to think differently.
And the people healed. And, in the absence of people living in ignorant, dangerous, mindless, and heartless ways, the earth began to heal.
And when the danger passed, and the people joined together again, they grieved their losses, and made new choices, and dreamed new imagines, and created new ways to live and heal the earth fully, as they had been healed.”
—Kitty O’Meara
Though we’re seven months further into this pandemic than we were when these lines were written, O’Meara’s poem still offers an inspiring vision. As we turn towards the last few months of 2020, I encourage you to consider how you can begin weaving rhythms of rest into your days. Could you go to bed earlier, read for a few hours of the long dark evening, spend an afternoon baking something from scratch?
What does it look like, in your life, to balance work and rest?
