When Rest Becomes the Real Work
It’s always strange how creativity slips away when life gets too loud.
At the back of your mind, you know it’s just a short break. Then days pass. Then weeks do too. Life carries on: you’re smiling and living. But at the back of your mind, the ideas keep going. They are percolating, waiting for you to sigh them all out.
Maybe you’ve felt it too, especially now during these times when everything feels heavier than ever.
There’s a gap between feeling like you must create in your chest and in your heart, but never getting to the desk to start.
As you eat another cracker and gaze guiltily at your notebooks staring back at you, you look at your camera roll and every photo forces you to dread your age and your smile.
“Omg, what am I doing?” you ask.
Still posting blog posts and who the hell is reading it?
After hours of overthinking, hoping you get a text you've been dreaming about for months and jealously staring at other successful blogs and content creators, the dread still doesn’t leave you.
But honestly... yes, honestly, sometimes the anxious restlessness is the work.
Yes, you are still working. It’s the part of the process that doesn’t look productive.
It doesn’t feel productive, but gently, it brought me to my desk today after three weeks and I’m writing from a place of creativity and curiosity.
I’m wondering if this rest also resets your system too — the rhythm of rest and focus that has plagued us all.
We need to create, but when we do it without rest, we burn out. But that’s the rhythm — the ebb and flow.
And so here are the moments that show the rhythm. Small, human moments:
- Running 11 km in the rain
- Drinking protein shakes
- Listening to Bon Iver until my thoughts softened
- Watching Outlander just to remember that stories take time
- And yes, stopping myself (again and again) from reaching out
It didn’t feel like creating.
But it was in its own quiet way.
Rest teaches you how to hold silence without panic.
Racing thoughts teach you that when it’s done, you can hold the ebbs and flows without being swept away.
It teaches you to trust that the spark never went away. It’s silently finding inspiration in your experiences.
And maybe, if you slow down long enough and let the work come to you, you’ll see there was always meaning in the slowness, in the restfulness.
Creativity happens.
And then, when you finally start writing, filming, painting ( or whatever your version of making is) the work feels different.
IT FEELS LIKE FLOW.
And that feels light and heavy but true more like you than it’s felt in weeks.
If you’re coming back from a creative hiatus, don’t rush the return.
Don’t measure your rest in lost momentum.
Measure it in honesty in how much clearer your why feels now.
THIS IS CREATIVITY, and it needs space to breathe.
GRATITUDE that we can create at all.