Rest is not Scarce

I have been following Tricia Hersey’s Instagram Account “The Nap Ministry” (Follow on Instagram here: @thenapministry; and visit her website here: https://thenapministry.wordpress.com). 

Hersey has proclaimed herself the Nap Bishop, and for the new year I have resolved to learn everything I can from her. Her message is not specifically for me, though. At least not directly. Her message is for the Black community who need to hear her central message: that rest is owed to them as reparations, and that they must take it. 

This is not a trite message, although it sounds simple. It is far from simple. Hersey has reached her current prophetic message through in-depth study, and by acknowledging her community’s inherited trauma of the Black body exploited for free labor. The intrinsic worth of the Black body has been for generations equaled to their productivity. Hersey posits that if every Black person refused to produce for the rest of their lives, it would only begin to heal their community and pay the debt our country owes them. That's how long and how wide the collective need for rest is in that community.

As a white person, I'm struggling to answer the question of what I can do to both enable (and empower) rest for the Black community, and also embody rest myself. 

Hersey is not saying that only Black people need rest, she's saying they are OWED rest. Rest has been stolen from generations of Black people. Her message is that white people, all people need to rest too, for the sake of rest itself, but more importantly, because rest is resistance to the capitalistic system that disproportionately burdens people of color.

All people need rest. We as white people are terrified to make room for more rest within our own communities, because deep down inside we know that the systems of capitalism and white supremacy favors our rest over others. Our rest is needed, and the systems in place are favorable for us to get it. We fear that if we make space for everyone to have rest, we'll lose our own.

Our fear and selfishness puts the security of our rest above the availability of rest for others. If you suss it all out: we've decided white supremacy is OK and necessary as long as it keeps our access to rest in quick supply. That's pretty crappy. It's also based on lies.

We all fear that rest is scarce. Short version: it isn't.

For Black people, the supply of rest has been limited either in reality (forced labor), or in manipulation (double standards). Black people have said they have to work twice as hard to get half as far. For Black people, rest might feel like giving up the fight. The system we have now, forces Black people to "hustle" just to get by. If they don't work harder than everyone else, the fear is not that they won't make it to the top, it's that they won't make it at all. 

This system is unjust. That's why Tricia Hersey says a big, fat NOPE to that. She's gonna bypass the system. She's challenging the established rules.

White people have secured access points to rest over a very long time. The way our economy works today protects that access. We work to uphold the systems that have supported our successes: capitalism, and what Hersey calls the "grind culture." We keep functioning within these systems because they are the only way we know how to get the "luxury" of rest and leisure. It's worked for us so far, right? 

If we work hard enough, we make enough money to take a vacation. If we work hard and long enough, we get to retire someday. If we work hard enough, we make enough money to hire other people to do the work that exhausts us. We can have a house cleaner, eat out, get the car detailed, the lawn maintained. We'll save time from all our hard work for rest. Work begets rest. It's worked for us for years, hasn't it? 

Ah, but it hasn't. The irony is that this doesn't seem to pan out for everyone, does it? In fact, more so than ever, it seems our system is working less and less, even for the people it was built to support: white people. 

We're still busy; ceaselessly working toward the next goal. We kick the finish line down the street by our own unsatisfied determination and desires. We wonder when we will "arrive" and the answer is never, because our goal is no longer rest. Our goal has become power, money, and prestige. These goals are mirages that shift as quickly as the slant of the sun on a desert road. This is the grind culture. 

One of the things I have learned with Hersey's message, is that work does not beget rest; rest begets rest. When we rest, we give space for more rest, for others to rest. 

It feels counter-intuitive, but think about it. When I decide that my work email does not need to be answered 24-7, I am setting a boundary that allows my colleagues to not feel like they need to answer my emails ASAP. By setting my own boundary, I am giving space and permission for other boundaries to be set. By de-escalating a situation from "urgent" to "normal," I am setting the tone for how (and how fast) we do things. We have been steadily inflating our speed to match each other in a weird time-speed race. Why are we rushing? Why are we trying to become machinery? Isn't life so much more than that? If we start to scale back, re-set the time-warp speed at which we expect things to be done, we will find rest and we will foster rest in our community.

Our community needs rest. We're in the middle of a pandemic, both physical and mental. Everywhere you look, you hear lonely and exhausted people, with very shallow wells of rest and reprieve to draw from. We blame it on the pandemic, but the truth is, the pandemic only revealed how shallow our wells were to begin with. The pandemic also revealed how heavily we relied on the productivity and grinding of the lowest paid, hardest working people of our society, a category of workers who are disproportionately Black and Brown people. 

A while ago, before the pandemic, I remember reading a post on social media by an exhausted local mother and thinking, I remember when I was that exhausted with young children, why aren't we helping each other more? The answer was and still is that we are all so caught up in the grind-culture that we can only maintain our own existence, our own rest. We feel like we have none to spare. Some people are lucky enough to have a functional village or family nearby for support. But most Americans today live isolated in a sea of people, hoarding their resources because they know they are close to exhaustion.

In order for rest to be realized at the communal level, we must resist the antithesis of rest: the grind culture. This grind culture is the "time-race" I'm talking about above, where everything has to be better, faster, more efficient to the point where we expect machine-like quality and efficiency without stopping to ask if it is even necessary (it isn't). 

Tricia Hersey states that at the base of this grind-culture, and what fuels the ugliness of capitalism, is white supremacy. The grind culture demands that everyone do and produce so that we may uphold some invisible standard (possession of power, privilege, and prestige). The grind culture inevitably forces that invisible standard to ceaselessly rocket higher and higher out of reach. Someone will always reach the goal, and therefore the goal must escalate, because someone else wants it. 

Most of the time, the person at the top is white, and not because they are awesome.

The whole idea built into white supremacy and grind culture is that someone wins. Someone gets to be at the top. Since there are millions of people in this race, there is almost never a winner, but rather a steady, recycling turn-table of the same rich, white people who were born two feet from the finish line. White people like to pride themselves if they were born ten feet from the line and by sheer hard work and skill, sprinted to the top. It feels like a victory. They shout down to the lower echelons of society: "I did it! I made it! Just keep moving, working, racing! You can make it too!"

Meanwhile, on Tricia Hersey's plane of existence, she is not concerned with the apoplectic and out of breath humans on the mountain top. She's napping. She opted out of the whole ridiculous thing. And she is telling her Black community that they can opt out too. They work hard enough. They don't need the race to be whole people.

Grind culture at its very basic function is a traumatizing and racist enterprise. Those who have had rest stolen from them for generations are asked to just keep producing more to keep up, catch up. Tricia Hersey is *done* with that. And we should be, too.

The problem is not whether we are working hard enough. The problem is the system that requires us to grind like machines.

She says that if we rest, we resist this manic operation. We stop the machine from churning out more broken Black bodies (and others who are crushed in this grind). We create space within our communities for all to rest.

So as a white person, when I rest, I am not only seeking that which is needed for myself, I'm squatting in protest on the foundation of white supremacy. I'm using my body as a clear signal that I will no longer participate in this culture that grinds all bodies to dust, particularly those with Black and Brown skin. I am putting a speed bump in the middle of a demonic racetrack. 

Rest begets rest: when I rest, I am communicating that I will not put my body into this cycle of burnout and needless urgency. I am setting a boundary which redefines what the social norms could be. As a white person, I have the privilege and responsibility to set those boundaries in ways that can shift social norms.

Tricia Hersey is calling on Black people everywhere to take a nap. While they nap, white people need to do the work of tearing down the grind culture. White people need to take turns napping and dismantling. 

We need to create a community where everyone has access to rest. We need to create a community where everyone has access to the good things in life: love, community, food, shelter, beauty, work, and the pursuit of happiness. We need to redefine the parameters of what success looks like. We need to take stock in what it means to be human, and what we need to feel whole. Spoiler: it's not power, prestige, or hoards of cash. Rest will teach us all. 

Follow #thenapministry on instagram for more on this revolutionary concept, and start your practice of rest today. Start resisting white supremacy, start resisting the grind culture, start embodying the wholeness of what it means to be human. 

Start where you can and build up. Take a nap, don't answer the email right away. Take time off work, and really take the time off. Don't be productive for a whole day and practice turning off that shame portal when you rest. Empower others in your family to rest. Empower it in your work space. And not the kind of rest that comes because you worked extra hard, hobbling to collapse at the finish line. Genuine, regular rest, before exhaustion. 

Change the small systems around you. Is someone doing the lion's share of work in your home? At work? Is it you? Or is it someone else? Create a system where the work (and rest) is shared. That might mean lowering expectations, and that is not a bad thing. Decrease urgency. 

De-stigmatise rest. It is not laziness. In fact, if you have any religious background, it is built into the foundations of nearly every major religious practice as Sabbath. For some, it's a commandment!

Challenge the current culture! Don't "try not to burnout"- be rested! Don't "try to balance life and work" - be rested! Resist productivity as an intrinsic virtue and value. View "well-rested" as the epitome of whole human experience. 

If you think you have no space or time for rest, The Nap Bishop will tell you that's not true. She knows. You have to brush your teeth every day and you have to rest every day.

Rest is not scarce. We must shake the bounds of white supremacy and embrace communal rest.