The radical act of rest

I’m not kidding around this time

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Earlier this month, when tasked by my family to create a holiday wish list, I could only come up with two things: 1) pretty notecards, and 2) a fried chicken sandwich on gluten-free bread from a local café.

I’m not kidding, that was it. I mean, the sandwich is just that good.

After being encouraged to flesh out the list, I added a few other small things but I had to dig deep to get to those items of delight. A good problem to have, I know.

What I want most is arguably the most immediate and the most challenging to capture amidst the busy day to day of working and parenting: quiet, rest, play, time together, the (internal) permission to watch as much Netflix as I want.

And there’s another tricky thing. I’m not typically an at-rest kind of person, though I am working on embracing stillness. Part of me attributes this to modeling; the one time I ever saw my Mom lie down in the years I lived at home was when she was laid up with a horrible case of the shingles (if you are 50+ by the way, go get your vaccine). Rest wasn’t an option in my hard-driving, scarcity-fearing household growing up, and the urgency to keep my foot on the gas solidified at age 17, at which point there was a direct relationship between my willingness to push myself to extraordinary painful lengths and my ability to stay in college. 

And so, when I am at work, I operate with what has been called a freakish level of focus and attention to both the creative big picture and the many details. And when I am not working, I tend to bustle in some way, shape, or form.

Finally, though, at age 50, I am ready for a true radical period of rest—I’m not kidding around this time.

If you have been with me for a while, you may recall that this year was pivotal. After a tumultuous, rage-inducing front half of the year, I decided to make a leap into uncertainty. It was not a light or impulsive decision. It required a shit ton of reflection, therapy, mental trust-building exercises, and running of numbers. There were many moments of catastrophizing during which I would squeeze my eyes tight and imagine standing on the precipice of financial ruin—where Young Adult Christine tapped on my shoulder and said, “You are expert at pushing yourself to extraordinary painful lengths. Just stay in that lane.”

But I was at the end of my rope. And being pushed to the edge emotionally in some ways was good because raw, intense feelings overrode my robotic, rationalizing, just-keep-shoveling-the-shit brain.

My original plan was to punctuate my leap with the radical act of taking July and August off from my primary revenue lane—creative strategy and consulting. By that point I had never taken more than a week of consecutive vacation since I started working as a young adult, so this was a big deal. 

I was ready to do it. Or at least I thought I was.

And then before I even reached my intended months of unemployment a couple of small, wonderful client projects came my way and I ended up taking them on because they were excellent fits to the types of work I love. I also suspect that at some level, I wasn’t quite ready to lean all the way in to trust in taking two months off.

That said, the good news was that even though I didn’t fulfill my radical act of intentional temporary unemployment, it ended up being a beautiful model for how I could keep consulting, but at a pace that was more reasonable and provided me plenty of room to recover, recalibrate, and become an actual human being again.

In September, a time-sensitive project that was in an emergency state came my way. If I took it on, about 6+ months worth of work would need to be compressed into an 11-week window. I was worried about how much I would need to work and the mission couldn’t have been a better alignment for me. The opportunity also emerged right as I was looking for my next project. And so commenced a very fruitful, chaotic stretch; the kind of project that I went to bed and woke up thinking about. 

The past six months have been fascinating; it has been wonderful to rediscover how much I love working—being autonomous and creative and solving problems for clients, and being able to do that free of toxicity and stupid bullshit. And the intensity of the last three months has also made me crave and appreciate the potential for rest. 

And so, I find myself now truly ready for a radical period of rest. Thanks to some intentional client pipeline orchestration, starting Friday, I am taking a full month off from consulting. I will be disrupting the busy and urgent holiday trap with things like baking holiday cookies with my kids; having plenty of time for games, cuddle time, and walks with my family; building fires—in a nutshell, fulfilling my holiday wish list of everyday things that don’t fit in a stocking or under a tree. 

Perhaps that’s why I had so much trouble creating a list of tangibles.

As I have reflected on this past year in the context of my home base, I’m grateful to be part of a family system that holds me with complete, unconditional love and care always, and in particular during tough times. Because of my trust in them, they get the rawest, roughest edges of me when I am in a tough season and Jon, Laurel, Violet, and even my dog James are the ones who urge me—in their own ways—to disrupt my own narrative around staying the extraordinarily painful course for survival’s sake. 

And so, I couldn’t be more delighted to present them with the restful, light side of me—the person that has been hoping and praying to finally arrive and who is now, indeed, here.