Rest

The rest you seek, you will not find from sleeping, but from waking…
A Course In Miracles

There was a time in my life when I was proud of the fact that I slept, on average, less than five hours per day. These were the years marked by my conviction that mountains could indeed be moved, if only the correct attitude and sufficient amounts of will power were applied. As an ambitious, competent executive in a hurry to make it to the top of the pile in international management, I had little tolerance for notions such as rest, enjoying the moment, or `being´ rather than `doing´. I could do all of that later…..

Needless to say, my house of cards came crashing down. This happened in my early forties, when the achievement of my goals appeared tantalising close, yet somehow still beyond reach. Only much later when introduced to the concept of the `hamster wheel looking like a ladder from the inside´ came the acceptance that I had fallen prey to a grand illusion, dynamic by nature, where the goalposts kept moving to ensure continued effort and, ultimately, constant distraction. Thankfully, the body has an array of resources ranging from the hand brake to the emergency brake and I have thus far been sufficiently tuned into mine to dodge the latter by giving attention to the former.

So I crashed and burned, as the term goes. My marriage, the daily company of my children, my family home, my career, my garden, my financial security, my confidence, and self-image; all went up in a puff of smoke during the long, hot summer of 2003. Lying in the rubble of my dreams, I was shocked, baffled, exhausted and in great emotional and existential pain.

Handling pain had not been my forte. Since my mid-teens, on discovering the anastatic effects of alcohol and marijuana, self-medication had become a major field of competence. The trouble with self-medication is that the pain, a regular by-product of life on this planet, accumulates over time out of sight, in the depths of our being. The pressure of the pain leads to a perception disorder whereby I become the victim of the machinations, real or imaginary, of others or even Fate. Thus, around the pain, layers of suffering coalesce, the `cause´ of the suffering mistakenly identified as `the others´. The more we suffer, the more we experience pain, which leads, in turn to more self-induced suffering until we can no longer differentiate illusion from truth, convinced, all along, that some dark forces are to blame for our predicament. Thus, by the grace of the Great Spirit, when the time was ripe, the pain succeeded in ultimately commandeering my attention. I then mustered the willingness to identify and implement the changes necessary to transcend it and heal.

This radical process released me from the `tyranny of positive thinking´. It took me the best part of a year to accept and begin to attend to my exhaustion. Sometimes even lifting the phone or going out to the shop to get toilet paper seemed too much for me. My sleep became disturbed, which frightened me greatly. Having finally decided to relinquish the option of self-medication, I felt raw, vulnerable and, sometimes, in great danger.

I joined a fellowship of people in recovery, which became my `safe haven´. It became my training ground for learning to `live life on life’s terms, without a mask´. This training ground, essential and beneficial, gave me the bones of  a new form of spirituality; not the pseudo-spirituality of abstract theological ritual and thinking, of which I had become adept and rather proud. This was, rather, spirituality in action; `trust God, clean house, help others´ – learning to live the values of forgiveness, loving-kindness and service.

Moving away from a stance of wanting only to sleep, I began to awaken to some hard facts and inconvenient truths; I have a choice in everything, with every breath I take; am the author of my own misery, in the form of suffering – which is voluntary and manifests whenever I resist the reality of my pain; am powerless over other people and in all major existential questions such as life and death; am responsible for cultivating my own mind into a garden of peace; am one among equals, with the choice to be a part of or apart from; and am the builder of my life, not the architect.

That was quite a lot to swallow. Thankfully, the process of recovery is consciously practiced in the spirit of `progress, not perfection’ and we are invited to live it `one day at a time´.

Having been thus `arrested´ from the hamster wheel, I began to appreciate the possibility, the legitimacy and the benefits of rest for the first time in my life. Self-care had been alien to me up to that point residing in that quadrant of the mind labelled `what I don’t know that I don’t know´. The option had simply never appeared on the radar screen of my consciousness. When asked by a loving friend one day toward the beginning of my recovery process; `What would be good for you right now Patrick?´, I was at a loss for words. Deep down inside it was clear that I was tired of struggling, of fighting life, of swimming against the current, of trying to run the show. The solution was to let go, which required trust, of which I had none.

In a recent encounter, a friend shared the following: `Both fear and faith ask me to put trust in something I cannot see.´ That resonated with me. The rest I seek is like that on my toddler daughter or son when, many years ago, they would turn to me towards the end of a long walk and say `Papi tragen´ (Daddy, please carry me).  I also recognised the need to be carried, only, in this case, I cannot `see´ the Great Spirit to whom I address my request. The building of this trust is a prerequisite to attaining that rest which we seek. The cultivation of gratitude for all the blessing showered upon us, – day in, day out, –  is a good way of supporting this process. Gratitude and an attitude of entitlement are mutually exclusive. Even a trace of entitlement is enough to keep mistrust entrenched in our hearts.  

When I take my daily walk along the river, I often think that those early years of my life were spent swimming upstream, in some way trying to defy the reality that I am not the architect but simply the builder of my life. Now, it seems, I have turned around, in trust, to go with the flow of life. This does not excuse me from doing my footwork, just as the builder needs to place brick upon brick, if a house is to be built. What it does do is to rid my mind of the chaos and confusion which stems from getting the roles confused. Once the `stinking thinking´ has been relieved and I begin to cultivate the mind as the beautiful garden it can be, that Holy Grail of every spiritual path, namely peace of mind, begins to develop.

It is in this peace of mind that the rest that had been sought all along resides.