Rest as restore-ation

“Rest begins with the prefix re-because it requires us to go back to a prior state. It is a second chance. It’s an opportunity to put back in order anything that has shifted out of alignment.”
—Dr Saundra Dalton-Smith

“Unprecedented times” is what we called it when our container of familiarity shifted dramatically two years ago. These times brought a high level of discomfort and fatigue that continues to this day. But truth be told, we had been getting by on a rest deficit long before then.

So, when a friend forwarded me a quiz about finding out what type of rest you need, I dismissed it; rest didn’t quite feel like the answer to my problem, which was fatigue mixed with restlessness mixed with apathy. New labels for it kept surfacing — surge-capacity depletion, languishing, burnout — but a way out of “it” was still eluding us. Getting some rest, at least as I understood it then, didn’t quite seem like