I’m sure I’m not the only one who feels some deep compulsion to always be doing something, especially something deemed “productive.” And I’m sure I’m also not alone in feeling immense guilt when I, inevitably, haven’t been productive. There are endless resources and articles and posts about resisting these dual forces of guilt and compulsion and embracing rest and inaction instead, so I won’t attempt to add anything.
However, there are other aspects that often get overlooked when discussing the importance of rest, and one in particular I’ve been thinking about. Simply put, it is a privilege to be able to rest. Resting, whether as a form of resistance or as a means to better productivity, rests on a presumption of invisible labor. That there are people behind-the-scenes doing some work that the restful rely on is true but unacknowledged.
While there is much that can and should be said about the privilege of rest and seeking justice for the restless, for now, I’m wondering if there isn’t a more radical way to think about rest, one that escapes the orbit of the rest/productivity binary altogether and maybe opens up a way for everyone, especially the restless, to participate in free and easy non-doing. I haven’t a clue what that would really look like, and I’m still just beginning to explore this, but a useful entry into this topic might be this story from the Zhuangzi.
Huizi said to Zhuangzi, “I have a big tree of the kind men call Stinktree. Its trunk is too gnarled and bumpy to apply a measuring line to, its branches too bent and twisty to match up to a compass or square. You could stand it by the road and no carpenter would look at it twice. Your words, too, are big and useless, and so everyone alike spurns them!”
Zhuangzi said, “Maybe you’ve never seen a wildcat or a weasel. It crouches down and hides, watching for something to come along. It leaps and races east and west, not hesitating to go high or low-until it falls into the trap and dies in the net. Then again there’s the yak, big as a cloud covering the sky. It certainly knows how to be big, though it doesn’t know how to catch rats. Now You have this big tree and you’re distressed because it’s useless. Why don’t you plant it in Not-Even-Anything Village, or the field of Broad-and-Boundless, relax and do nothing by its side, or lie down for a free and easy sleep under it? Axes will never shorten its life, nothing can ever harm it. If there’s no use for it, how can it come to grief or pain?”
Chapter 1, Burton Watson translation
Sometimes I worry about rest becoming too useful an idea. Meaning, it is at times in service of and subservient to productivity and not really an antidote as some would have it. Rest as a means to a more productive end, in other words. Like the weasels and wildcats, resting and waiting just to leap and race. Their rest was in service of their effort, and they we ensnared as a result.
Earlier in the same chapter, Zhuangzi tells us that the somewhat mythological figure Liezi, who was renowned for his ability to ride the wind, and who could stay aloft for fifteen days before coming back to earth, was masterful in his ability to rest and be carefree. In fact, it was his very ability to skillfully avoid getting tangled up in the minutiae of productivity that gave him the freedom to roam the clouds for weeks at a time.
Liezi could ride the wind and go soaring around with cool and breezy skill, but after fifteen days he came back to earth. As far as the search for good fortune went, he didn’t fret and worry. He escaped the trouble of walking, but he still had to depend on something to get around.
Chapter 1, Burton Watson translation
Yet, as Zhuangzi is careful to point out, even Liezi has something upon which he depends. His free and easy wandering in the clouds is dependent upon something to keep him afloat. That he is dependent is not the issue, because that is true of everyone everywhere—it is constitutive of life to be dependent. The problem is that he isn’t aware that he is relying on something else for his free and easy roaming. Which reminds me of something Thoreau said,
“If I devote myself to other pursuits and contemplations, I must first see, at least, that I do not pursue them sitting upon another man’s shoulders. I must get off him first, that he may pursue his contemplations too.”
Civil Disobedience, Thoreau
Speaking of Thoreau, he also sees the value not just in resting and inaction, per se, but in a specific type of restful activity.
“Many a poor, sore-eyed student that I have heard of would grow faster, both intellectually and physically, if, instead of sitting up so very late to study, he honestly slumbered a fool’s allowance.
I would not have every man cultivated, any more than I would have every acre of earth cultivated. Some must be preparing a mould by the annual decay of the forests which they sustain.”
Journal 13 February, 1851
This specific journal entry was included and expanded in his lecture-turned-essay Walking, and appears like this in the final version:
I would not have every man nor every part of a man cultivated, any more than I would have every acre of earth cultivated: part will be tillage, but the greater part will be meadow and forest, not only serving an immediate use, but preparing a mould against a distant future, by the annual decay of the vegetation which it supports.
Walking, Thoreau
The changes are subtle but important. The addition of, “nor every part of a man,” I think is especially interesting. As I read it, he is making a set of analogies between the student’s intellectual pursuits and the cultivation of the earth on the one hand, and the student’s foolish slumber and the uncultivated decay on the other. The intellectual pursuits and cultivated fields rely on something for their success: muck and mire fertilizes and sustains the forests; foolish slumbering sustains the student.
Perhaps, then, it isn’t so much about preserving the duality and achieving a “balance” between rest and productivity, or doing and non-doing, cultivated and wild. Maybe it’s more about doing all things in a fertile and foolish way, or, in a sort of Zhuangzian way of phrasing it, being restfully productive. Cultivating with an uncultivated attitude.
There is a tension here I am struggling to understand. Thinking about rest and non-doing while it is still coupled to productivity and effort undermines both. You end up trapped in a cycle that depletes the very soil you’re depending on, robbing the system of vital nutrients.
Yet depending on others to do work so that we can rest is, I think, unavoidable. Our rest comes at a cost, and that cost is the labor done by those we rely on. Thinking about the meadows and forests, and the millions of microorganisms, insects, fungi, etc., breaking down the vegetation into fertile soil—that is work, real work. Work that we rely on. We rest on the shoulders of those beings for our continued survival. Their productivity is our rest.
For now, I think it’s helpful to consider how I do the things I must. Upon whose shoulders am I resting? On what do I depend for my rest? It’s easy to see the ways in which I am productive, and even to see how my rest has benefited me. But it is much more difficult to see the ways that my rest relies on the work of others. Even Zhuangzi, resting under a useless tree, is depending on it for his rest.