Summer is officially upon us where I live in the US. And while I love to chock-fill my summer to the brim with fun and adventure, I’m realizing I need to build in more time for rest. My travels — which I love and which fill me with joy — often leave me feeling some exhaustion. I want to see and do “everything” when I am exploring a new place, and my deep FOMO pushes me to go, go, go every day at a break-neck speed. However, I am learning that type of pace can result in depletion. I do want to drink in all that I can of a new city or town, but I also want to strike some type of balance between that kind of excitement along with stillness so that I may feel refreshed when I return home. Nobody has time for a vacation from her vacation.

So today, I am wishing myself and you some rest this summer.

dandelions_rsFrom the incomparable David Whyte:

“Rest is the conversation between what we love to do and how we love to be. Rest is the essence of giving and receiving. Rest is an act of remembering, imaginatively and intellectually but also physiologically and physically. To rest is to give up on the already exhausted will as the prime motivator of endeavor, with its endless outward need to reward itself through established goals. To rest is to give up on worrying and fretting and the sense that there is something wrong with the world unless we are there to put it right; to rest is to fall back literally or figuratively from outer targets and shift the goal not to an inner static bulls eye, an imagined state of perfect stillness, but to an inner state of natural exchange….To rest is not self indulgent, to rest is to prepare to give the best of ourselves, and perhaps, most importantly, arrive at a place where we are able to understand what we have already been given.” ©2013 David Whyte, Excerpted from REST From the upcoming book of essays CONSOLATIONS: The Solace, Nourishment and Underlying Meaning of Everyday Words.

What can you do today to embrace a bit of rest?

Meghan of Life Refocused