by Harshal Desai
I refuse to believe ‘rest’ is merely a requirement as a response to tiredness, to exhaustion. ‘Rest’ is not merely a state of reclaiming one's health. A kind of a bodily ‘stagnancy’, whose prescription is made necessary only by the prevalent disease or exhaustion. The ordinary course of our lives is after all also a tiresome vocation. All the tiredness seems to seep into the body little by little. And the days are like heavy drops, from a constantly dripping tap, each sent hiding deep into the earth.
Rest is more than mere reclamation (of health). Rest is also more than the vocabulary of pain and tire in whose context we have learned to name it. Rest is a place of defining health itself. A place we enter to see our understanding of health from without. If rest is only a response to pain and hurt and exhaustion, health is nothing more than the absence of these things, because after all rest (as understood this way) is only a reclamatory state to it. Reducing 'rest’, to only such a materialistic understanding according to me, limits greatly as to when the restive state is ‘justified’ and when not. Refusing to acknowledge ‘rest’ as also as an a-responsive, creative place, which we may arrive at freely, we run the risk of wrongly labelling some as mere indolence. If the entire understanding of rest is pain or ache-based, we can never lay a ‘claim’ to rest, if firstly there exists no ache/pain, and secondly, if such ache/pain is not communicable.
In our times, the idea of ‘rest’, is juxtaposed with capitalist understanding of the body as a mere capital to be worked on and let off from time to time. I think it is extremely difficult, but important to disentangle our bodies, minds and hearts from the net and knots of the capitalist understanding of work,
rest and body. ‘Work’ and ‘rest’ are not contrary, but mutually coexisting (even in principle), not merely supplementary, as long as work is a
natural product of the acting body (not an imposition) and rest, its result. In this way, the body acts, which is to say it works, and this fructifies as rest. ‘Art’ is thence, rest; good household work, the raising of children, the listening of each other’s lives at the dinner table, to see the face of another in light, to converse, to pray, to be grateful, to love, is
also to rest.
As long as our de-capitalist understanding of ‘work’ and ‘rest’ is tied together, it is unsurmisable to think of rest as leading to indolence, mere inactivity. Rest being non contingent, truly constantly renews, rejuvenates and is a product in itself. It is not a period when work or living may be paused, to only have ourselves be ceaseless apprehensive about it, but where the eclectic entirety of our being delves and finds a deeper depth of being.