April 15, 2022

Volume 3, Issue 8: What If We Did Nothing?

This is supposed to be subscriber-only issue of Enthusiastic Encouragement & Dubious Advice but today it's free!

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Clearly someone at Reductress has been spying on me because earlier this week this article was published: “How to Make Time for Your Art and Then Clean for Five Hours Instead.” Which is pretty much what we did last weekend. We cleaned off wine racks that had too-old bottles of our homemade apple wine (which basically tasted like rocket fuel). We dumped it all and found we didn’t really need the wine racks. We got rid of them and picked up a new bookshelf from IKEA which now made room for the six piles of books we had on the floor. I also cleaned off the shelf where we have alcohol, dumped a bunch of what we weren’t drinking, and made room for my cookie jar. We also did a pantry re-org and found a home for the panini press and the waffle iron and put my bean hoard in a place where I could both see them and reach them without a step stool because I am a halfling. We are slowly reclaiming our space.

I did zero writing. Or ukulele. Or “fun” reading. I did, however, make my own sour mix from scratch and made the best margaritas I ever had in my life. And honestly, I would also drink this sour mix over a lot of ice with some fizzy water added, no alcohol necessary. Recipe here. Be warned it is very intense and a little goes a long way. Ice is very, very necessary.

The one thing we did not do last weekend that we really should have was: rest. This week has been A Lot™ and I went into it already depleted. We were also shoving all our work into four days because we are taking today [Friday] off. We are taking today off because we are trying to use our PTO as a kindness to ourselves. Normally on our “random days off” we’ll plan a local adventure like going someplace new to us, going shopping, going to the beach, etc. Wednesday rolled around and we hadn’t “planned” our day off and I thought:

What if we do nothing? What if, on our day off, we rest? What if we puttered around the apartment doing knitting and ukulele and maybe watching a silly show or a musical? What if we found a new bakery to go to in the morning and stocked up on goodies and then curled up on the futon and listened to records? And that’s it. That’s all we would do and it would be enough.

Surprising no one who knows me, my therapist is trying to get me to embrace rest as being productive and internalizing the fact that rest has value. Like, yes, I know it is important to rest and I know academically that rest has value but it’s hard to embrace it psychologically and emotionally.

I am also trying to harmonize these two discordant truths. First, that we are worthy of rest simply by existing. Not when our work is done. Not when our home is spotless. We are worthy of rest whenever we want or need it. Second, that life is simultaneously long and incredibly too short and I want to shove every moment of it with living and learning and experiencing and creating.

Yes, I know that one is dependent on my ability to do the other. That I need to rest in order to have the spell slots to do all this living. But I am, at my core, impatient.

I have been finding a lot of inspiration from The Nap Ministry:

The creator, Tricia Hersey, has a book coming out this fall: Rest is Resistance: A Manifesto. Rest is especially poignant for Black Americans, as our ancestors were not allowed to rest. When I see very successful folks wearing shirts that say, “I am my ancestors’ wildest dreams,” I often think about my ancestors and how maybe they’d just like to sit down for a bit. How luxurious it would be to have food delivered from a restaurant. I haven’t won an Olympic medal or made an award-winning film but I, too, am my ancestors’ wildest dream.

I recently finished reading How to Keep House While Drowning: A Gentle Approach to Cleaning and Organizing by KC Davis and holy shit it’s what I needed. It comes out at the end of this month so I’ll share more about it after it is out. She can be found on Instagram @StruggleCare and she talks about choosing to do nothing as a kindness to yourself. Or doing care tasks (her preferred term over “chores”) like washing the coffee pot before bed as a kindness to yourself for the morning. I’ve always referred to doing things like this as “Setting up future Me for success” and I was smacked with the inherent capitalist/productivity tone of putting it that way. So believe me, I’m definitely rethinking that one and rolling that new information around in my brain.

Bringing this back to our day off, what if we allow ourselves rest as a kindness to us? Yes, the aquarium is always a good time and I’m always down to shop but what if I try to learn to be just as eager to have some lowkey down time? I am, as we all are, a work in progress.

That’s it for this week! You can shop any books I’ve mentioned in this newsletter at my affiliate shop, The Infophile’s Bookshop, and support independent bookstores. If you want to send me some snail mail, you can find me at P.O. Box 21481, Oakland, CA 94620-1481. If you are a paid subscriber and would like for me to send you some happy mail, feel free to give me your address.

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That’s it for this week! You can shop many books I’ve mentioned in this newsletter at my affiliate shop, The Infophile’s Bookshop, and support independent bookstores. In fact, any Bookshop, Amazon, or Etsy links in this newsletter are affiliate links so if you shop through those, it helps support my work. Or you can leave me a tip on Ko-fi, Paypal, or Venmo.

If you want to send me some snail mail, you can find me at P.O. Box 21481, Oakland, CA 94620-1481.

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