If I rest, am I slowing down?
by Afolabi Adekaiyaoja
Notes on Living is a column of considered points of view about how we are co-creating this life. What stirs our hearts? What feeds us? How do the challenges that animate our most frequent thoughts move through us, individually and collectively? What has life shown us about itself? How are we finding belonging and making meaning/healing in all this?
Last year, I messaged Afolabi Adekaiyaoja, a Nigerian researcher at the International Centre for Tax and Development, to ask if he had reflections he would like to contribute here. There was a back and forth and here is his last email where he reflects on the knots in his idea of rest. My response follows.
Fri, Jun 21, 2024, 1:34 AM
Hi Studio Styles,
I think that one pitch—the question of privilege—might be clearer than the other when it comes about in the ongoing discussion and debate around rest. There is a different life where this morphs into a paper on 'The Politics of Rest'. Who can rest? What is rest? And how do we accommodate rest at a time and in a place that forces a much more existential and frankly visceral reaction to the many vicissitudes around us? To rest is to be fickle and intentional, to be firm and fluid, to be fair and fair weather... it is also to be. It is indeed the most personal action there is.
But to rest has increasingly come across as a sign of privilege. I have explored privilege in different forms and guises in recent years, especially through politics. My underlying preoccupation is that privilege dictates how we interact with leaders. It is why some feel very put off and indignant at the sense that some people can have their votes bought. Here, the politics of privilege conforms to its impact on economic and political prospects, and how that, in turn, affects the latitude that we can afford.
The percentage of Nigerians who can afford to take a break and detach from the restless hustle that is life is reducing. There are several pieces about the shrinking middle class, and the elite has always been described as 1% (and lesser figures). This now relates to how we interact with rest vis-à-vis the idea that to be successful and good means to be as active or to burn the candle at both ends. The idea of having a 9-5 and a 5-9. The idea that pausing or stopping will lead to a slowdown and the potential irrevocable loss of pace and position. There is a whole industry on this end that seeks to burnish this idea.
So what does this mean? If I can rest, then there is a privilege to be able to do so right? But there shouldn't be. Rest should be—as with most things that have become increasingly pricey—a basic human right. Anyone should be able to rest and not feel guilt, and at least not feel that there needs to be a very stark and distinct expression of breaking oneself simply to exist and belong.
To bring in the personal, I think that I would ordinarily identify as a member of the middle class. I have been able to get educated to a postgraduate level at top schools and foreign university education. I can count foreign travels, and my work is a bit more 'global' than 'local'. But there remains a clear acknowledgement that this is not 'enough'. A significant expense cannot be made without needing to make it back. And, there is even an extant case, that my status is reducing in an era where others who would not be conventionally considered middle class are grafting at an exponential pace. This brings the question of if I rest, am I slowing down?
Why does it matter? Why should we care? Well the prevailing argument is that longer term plans, such as raising children and expanding responsibilities, will be affected. My parents worked single jobs, with the occasional side contract here and there, and were able to sponsor family members to school, pay for our expenses and invest in land and other projects. I make more now, than my parents did at this age in their life, but the value has been completely eviscerated. So, if I too aim to provide even the basic traits of my upbringing to my own children, I need to work harder and think harder about how to do so. There is always the case that I might be working hard and not smart—a lingering fear—but I would argue that the cyclical dimensions of work value and engagement are a different piece or argument to be had.
What does this mean for rest? I have tried to ground this rest in the activities to savour. I go to a board games cafe regularly and I also watch movies in the cinema—an increasingly extravagant expense—when I can. I make a trip when possible and I carry out some slightly avant-garde activities, which might also be a latent desire to conform to the middle-class expectations that living in a capital city can subconsciously impose. But there is also the acknowledgement that I have made, and could be flawed logic, that true rest comes from an ability to sufficiently dissociate and unplug. Can anyone truly be unplugged or disconnected in an increasingly interconnected environment? It does not appear to be as easy a task.
And this is perhaps where I am at a crossroads in my unpacking - am I now attaching a premium or consideration to rest in a way that is inherently unfeasible and wrong? Is there even a way that this can be addressed or standardised? Or is this relationship with the concept of rest beyond privilege and place and truly simply a measure of a mental interaction that I have boxed into a binary view of work and no work? These are questions worth unpacking I suppose, but one could even argue that inflating this process is another sense of itself that I am privileged to think about.
As I round up this email, I do want to address a major loophole in this mental exercise—anything can indeed be rest. If we describe rest as a state of mental inertia that is designed to ensure a body and mind are able to recover from gruelling exertions, then rest goes beyond sleep. It can include a leisurely stroll, a drive, a game, sex and even other activities we are unlikely to gain any direct financial gain from, and this could even be determined via our ability to potentially pay for through time or money. So if this is the case, then perhaps I have been resting in ways and manners that I am not acknowledging. And perhaps, dear Immaculata, the fault is in our stars.
Love and light,
Afolabi
Thursday, Feb 6, 2024, 9:13 AM
Hi Afolabi,
It sounds to me as though the rest of leisure time, games night or sex is not the rest you’re deeply concerned with. It sounds like you’re concerned with rest as in freedom from the feeling of being trapped in a race. From what I know about you beyond this email exchange, I know you resent this feeling of being trapped in a race.
But you wrote: “There is a whole industry on this end that seeks to burnish this idea [that pausing or stopping will lead to a slowdown and the potential irrevocable loss of pace and position.]” You opt into this industry, and you do not opt out of that idea.
You also wrote that to rest is “to be fickle […] and fair-weather” and from what I know of you, being fickle and fair-weather are not virtues in your dictionary. So not only do you get your daily bread from a value system that threatens you with irrevocable loss of status, you also, deep down, label rest in language that is at odds with your personal values. I say this to point out that my sense is that you think rest is a human right in freedom, which you’re not in alignment with yourself about wanting for yourself.
You did not ask me any question directly but where you write “But there remains a clear acknowledgement that this is not 'enough'. A significant expense cannot be made without needing to make it back,” I thought to myself, oh no this is not a universal acknowledgement and I know at least one person who makes a significant expense without needing to make it back.
I find it worth locating one’s self in relation to one’s thoughts so that, for example, that thought goes from “a significant expense [by immutable nature of itself] comes with the need to make it back”, to “when I make a significant expense, I feel the need to make it back.”
When I locate myself in thoughts like that, it contains the thought into a bag and I’m able to consider that there is more to the world than that bag. That I am able to choose a different meaning/concept I have of the world or my life.
It is both a simple and challenging thing to change one’s concept of oneself and of the world because when you shift a concept block, things will most likely fall. It reconfigures everything, and the outward change could be big, it could be small, there’s no way to know. That is terrifying. And doable.
-Nneoma/Immaculata.