The trouble with rest...

Don't forget it's the writing hour at 9am.

Photo by Jinwei Ding on Unsplash

“When you rest, you catch your breath and it holds you up, like water wings…” Anne Lamott

I keep saying I want to rest.

You know, proper rest. Blank-page rest. Feet-up, slow-breath, soup-simmering-on-the-stove kind of rest.

But then I actually get a bit of space at the weekend and instead of relaxing, I immediately want to start twelve new projects, open a B&B in Provence, learn French and Japanese, overhaul my fitness regime, launch a new podcast, and write a musical about the menopause.

It’s like the minute I create space in my life, my creativity pops up like an overexcited toddler with armfuls of glitter and glue shouting “LET’S MAKE STUFF!”

I used to think this was a problem. Shouldn’t I be more zen? More still? More sage-in-a-cave with a contented smile and a cashmere shawl?

But when I sit still—when I really sit still—I find the stillness isn’t still at all. It’s noisy. It’s fireworks. It’s dancing horses, pirouetting across the mental stage. Thoughts crash, burn, resurrect themselves like overly dramatic soap characters. The void is more Glastonbury than monastery.

Yes, meditation helps. But even then, I find myself narrating it like David Attenborough: "Here we have a rare moment of peace... oh no, it’s thinking again!"

And the truth is, I love to create. It’s not just what I do, it’s who I am. My cooking style is best described as ‘Suzy Surprise’ (meals made with such creative flair, you’re never quite sure what you’re chewing). I decorate my house like a set designer on a sugar rush. Even my walking routes are spontaneous—why take the same way home when I could follow that curious-looking alley and possibly end up in a parallel universe?

So perhaps the issue isn’t rest versus creativity.

Maybe creativity is a form of rest for me.

Maybe my nervousness around space is not because there’s something wrong with me, but because I’ve been taught that rest should look a certain way: blank, passive, nap-like. (Although I am very good at napping, can I say? I can do unconscious really well. I’m just not good at sitting and resting.)

But what if that’s OK? But maybe there’s a slight tweak I can make? What I need isn’t creative productivity - you know, creativity with a purpose and a deadline (write another book, host a weekly supper club in my front room, paint Alnwick Castle watercolours and flog them on Etsy). Maybe what I’m really craving is creative play - just daydreaming about new ideas without pressure to do them. Or pottering. Or lying down and letting my mind scribble all over the ceiling.

Maybe rest doesn’t mean stopping creativity, it just means letting go of the to-do list and inviting in the doodles, the nonsense, the unprofitable musings. Maybe it means trusting that we’re still growing, even when it looks like we’re doing nothing at all.

So maybe I’m not bad at resting. Maybe I just rest… creatively.

What about you? What’s your relationship with rest? Do you embrace the pause, or do you immediately fill it with ten new Pinterest boards and a plan to start a kombucha empire?

Your prompt:
Write for 10 minutes about what happens inside you when you pause. What bubbles up? What do you notice? Does anything surprise you?

Join us:
Come and write with our kind, lovely group at the Heart Leap Writing Hour today at 9am. Bring your coffee, your dancing horses, your glitter-glue thoughts. (No judgement here)

Here’s the link: