What Keeps You Busy?

This is one of our fears of quiet; if we stop and listen, we will hear this emptiness. If we worry we are not good or whole inside, we will be reluctant to stop and rest, afraid we will find a lurking emptiness, a terrible, aching void with nothing to fill it, as if it will corrode and destroy us like some horrible, insatiable monster. If we are terrified of what we will find in rest, we will refuse to look up from our work, refuse to stop moving. We quickly fill all the blanks on our calendar with tasks, accomplishments, errands, things to be done—anything to fill the time, the empty space.

Wayne Muller, Sabbath

I notice myself wanting to fill my Saturday with errands and meal planning — things that “need to get done.”

An inner voice tells me to sit down and do my year-end-review, my year-ahead planning, a content calendar, a strategic plan. To clear up paperwork and clear out closets.

All important and necessary things that must get done.

And then another voice tells me to pull Sabbath off the shelf. It falls open to this page, where Muller so eloquently describes the fear of rest, an epidemic of our times.

My copy of Wayne Muller’s book Sabbath is well-worn.

When I pick it up, it opens to a page in the chapter entitled Fear of Rest.

The tape flag on that page is so old that its color has worn.

The spine of the book is cracked at this page, so that the book stays open here and lays flat.

Paragraphs are highlighted in multiple shades of yellow, showing the reemphasis after the initial highlights had faded. Some are also underlined. Notes litter the margins.

It’s increasingly common these days to read books digitally. But there are things you can learn from a physical book that you can’t ever hope to glean from a digital version.

The Rest We Need

That the spine is broken in this place tells me how often I’ve come here to reread Muller’s words and the effort I’ve invested to keep the book open at this spot without putting something on top of it.

The fact that I return here so often is not an accident: this is the lesson I most need to embody.

It’s a lesson of particular importance as we enter into the winter season and the final week of the year. It’s a time ideally suited to rest and being in the emptiness, yet our modern culture fills it with holiday gatherings and things to do.

Much talk is given to the importance of sleep and physical rest. But rest is not complete if we aren’t also resting the mind.

Muller’s words remind me that it is not only the body and mind that need to rest. It is also the spirit and soul. We need moments of emptiness in order to refill, in order to seed the potential of new life and new projects.

Resistance to Rest

Many of us are resistant to this type of rest.

In a world of noise, the spaces of silence can be deafeningly loud.

We don’t know what voices will show up, what visions will arise. Or what won’t arise.

We are not acclimated to be in this emptiness, we may not know how to navigate its terrain.

It’s easier to stay busy, to be in the land of doing, in the realm of form, in the illusion of what we can control.

It’s easier to be anywhere where we don’t have to risk confronting ourselves.

It’s human nature to fear what we might miss if we allow ourselves to rest, to retreat, from the world for a day or two.

But it seems we stand to miss out on more when we are constantly hustling and running around.

Rereading Muller’s rich prose, I remember the beauty of slowing down, the fruitful potential of sacred rest and silence, and the gift of presence.

I remember that my first role in this world is as a human being.