Last year, the Rotterdam-based design student Kirsten Spruit created an audiovisual installation which she called “A Space to Stay”. Visitors were invited to lie face down on a black mattress, wrap themselves in headphones that reproduce typical sounds of pleasant landscapes, and do nothing at all.
A video that slowly showed a succession of Messages such as “I feel like I didn’t do anything today” encouraged thoughts related to passivity in the participants. Spruit states: “‘A Space to Stay was born from an investigation around the feeling of permanent activity, the need to always be productive and efficient, which seems to dominate the lives of so many people, especially among my generation.”
Is this what rest has become? An art gallery exhibition, like a relic of a happy past? Something we can do only when we are invited to an event? Apparently yes.
Claudia Hammond, presenter of the BBC Radio 4 program “Everything in the Mind” and author of the book “The Art of Rest”, believes that “being busy has become a matter of honor. It has become something we expect of ourselves and others.
Unfortunately, the evidence indicates that we think that busy people are better. Even the break has been somewhat commercialized. Notice the tendency to seek wellness. There is this idea that we should be doing what is good for us. ”
This is all taking a toll : We feel guilty when we rest, so we don’t do it enough.
Earlier this year, an investigation among Americans of between 45 Y 65 years revealed that they were more stressed than people their age in the decade of 1990. The World Health Organization has classified stress as one of the “epidemics of the 21st century.”
Not surprisingly. The covid pandemic has meant that we are at the same time frantic, worried, frequently at home and without access to most of life’s restorative activities. If the global emergency is teaching us anything, it is that the old ways of life do not work, not for us, not for others, not for the planet. We need to review not only our behavior, but that of society. One of the best ways to do this could be to simply stop.
“We are seeing a gradual backlash against productivity and self-improvement, and a shift towards practical boredom, introspection and inhibition”. Holly Friend, Foresight Analyst at The Future Laboratory, told BBC Culture: “With no choice but to stay home and review their priorities, consumers are experiencing a new pace of life that will affect their routines during the last years. This period is giving people the opportunity to feel comfortable losing themselves and doing nothing, activities that were previously covered by stigma and ‘millennial’ guilt. ”
The change was close to everyone shapes. At the beginning of 2019, a survey of more than 2.200 people across the UK showed that the 80% of “millennials” declared themselves happy when parties and meetings to which they had been invited were canceled. In February of 2020, the California psychiatrist Cameron Sepah coined the concept of “dopamine fasting,” from the constant stimuli of modern life.
Alternatively, we should allow ourselves to be bored or alone, or indulge in simpler and more natural activities, thus doing versus compulsive behaviors that could, contrary to what we think, be making us unhappy.
How do we do this? First, taking care of ourselves, and within this new prism there are some old ways. “The art of rest” was based on a survey of more than 18, people who were asked which activities they found most relaxing and rested. The seventh on the list turned out to be bathing.
The chapter entitled “A good hot bath” should take us all head to the bathtub. Last year’s launch of the “We Bathers” campaign by the cosmetics firm Lush, with a video that explored these intimate moments of personal care, now seems like a moment of pre-pandemic intuition.
But there are other types of bathrooms that are gaining ground. Sound baths using gongs or singing bowls from Tibet have been chosen by the American publisher Conde Nast as one of the wellness trends for travelers in 2020.
Previously usual mainly in “New Age” shelters, among their faithful there are now figures like Hollywood stars Robert Downey Jr. and Charlize Theron. But beyond the fact that some celebrities like them, a long history attends these practices.
For more than 40, 10 years ago, aboriginal tribes used in the same way an instrument called Diyeridú. In the Tibetan spiritual tradition, gongs were considered objects with deep ties to the nature of the cosmos.
Experts in this practice assure that sound vibrations can relax the patterns of brain waves, reduce heart rate, decrease stress and pain, and relieve anxiety.
“I have come to realize that the states of deep meditation that I reached with the disciplined practice of meditation are they reached much faster with sound meditation “, reflects Tamara Klien, one of the regulars of the sound baths.
” I love what it feels like. There is a very particular bodily sensation, which is essentially the body reaching a process by which it heals itself ”, he concludes. Meanwhile, other Eastern philosophies continue to attract Westerners with exhausted minds.
Last year, the organization Conservationist Woodland Trust suggested including forest bathing among the non-medical therapies recommended by health professionals, a practice of immersing oneself with the five senses in a forest environment that emerged in the decade of 1980 in Japan, where she is known as shinrin-yoku.
These are not mere walks in the park. “People think at first that walking in the country is something they have been doing their whole lives,” Gary Evans, founder of the UK Forest Bathing Institute, told the Journal Observer.
” But maybe it’s hasty walks, or maybe you’re worried because you don’t know where the dog went. A better way to conceive of time in the forest is through conscious time under the grove with a purpose of health and well-being ”, added Evans.
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Nature as a remedy
None of this has taken Hammond by surprise, in whose book appears to spend time in a natural environment second, only after reading. “Walking through nature puts things in perspective and makes us think that we are a tiny part of the wide world,” he says.
Hammond interviewed writer Richard Mabey, who suffered from depression and who found support in nature. “If you look at a marsh during 10 minutes, at the end of that time it will be completely different than at the beginning. That was what affected me most deeply, being part of a living system, ”Mabey told him.
We have forgotten all the good things that resting can bring us , in addition to physical and mental health. “Rest gives us time to re-enter, an ability that we had recently lost,” says Friend.
“The incessant rush toward self-improvement has distracted us from the benefits of relaxation, pleasure, and even from boredom, which are states that have proven to make us more productive ”. Far from being suspicious of dead times, we should welcome them as opportunities. “Free moments in which you have nothing to entertain yourself or company with, can actually generate creativity,” says Susan J. Matt, historian of emotions.
Other philosophers see a world coming in that the best way to rest is to help society. Women’s rights advocate Adrienne Maree Brown proposes in one of her books a new vision of ethics and activism as a form of personal liberation, while existentialist philosopher Sandy Grant envisions the emergence of an economy of pleasure in life. That giving things up, instead of owning them, becomes fun. “Instead of enjoying cars or trips that others can’t afford, why not reject the pleasures that exploit or harm others.”
If this doesn’t take away the seductive glow of empty consumerism and the insatiable desire to possess, nothing can do it. Perhaps that is why experts are beginning to understand rest as the last act of rebellion. Be it nature baths, sound baths or water baths, they are all a way out of the hamster wheel.
In a small manifesto published in 1990, Georgina Johnson called her readers to consider the cost of the way, often artificially accelerated, in which they lived and worked. His latest book, published in English under the title “The Slow Grind” (“The slow routine”, in Spanish), analyzes the problem of sustainability from the perspective of mental health, fashion, race, education, social justice and climate change, and wondering how we can build a different world.
Speed may be one of the first things to put aside. “Enjoyment and rest are becoming more and more political acts against the mechanism of current systems”, assures Friend.
“In the past, leisure was mixed with guilt, since the business fetish had led to the expectation that even free time should be invested in perfecting ourselves physically and intellectually. But with the isolation and loneliness that have become the new normal, rest becomes an easy and pleasant way to resist. ”
Bridget Luff agrees with her guide to the movement and the meditation. “Slowing down a bit allows us to have perspective, and it is the antithesis of what western societies dictate.”
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“A nap, a bit of meditation, or just a pause away from a screen, moving away from the sales network, orders and stories that we are constantly fed with, let us live in a more authentic reality ”, he adds. “Rest is an act of silent rebellion, which allows us new you are going to see the world and be in it. ”
Friend concludes:“ Taking a step back, pausing and re-evaluating the stressful things in our lives is necessary to acquire skills that we need now more than ever, like resilience. In a year that has attacked us from behind, we have come to realize that as humans we need to be ready to adapt and change our priorities without warning. Rest is becoming essential in this regard. In order to deal with this world of extremes, we need to feel calm and focused. ”
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