Are you lying down? Tricia Hersey’s Rest is Resistance

“I hope you are reading this while laying down!”
― Tricia Hersey, Rest Is Resistance: A Manifesto

As children, we learn so much about work from watching our parents, guardians, and other adults in our lives. Many of the values they hold about work they teach us through school. I grew up under the care of a single parent working 40-60 hours a week in a community of fishers, foresters, and farmers. 9-5 jobs were for city people. We woke up with the sun and fed, milked, lifted, cut, hauled, moved, and operated until the moon was up. 

You may already be familiar with the Nap Bishop, Tricia Hersey, and her Nap Ministry social media work. Over many years she has written and developed a framework for reclaiming our holy right to rest. Her 2022 bestseller Rest is Resistance: A Manifesto speaks to all of us in societies driven by capitalism where profit is seen as the saviour and human labour is the pinnacle of virtue. 

I’ll start with my primary skepticism. How does a rest framework include those who live in poverty or under oppressive forces who are forced to work inhumane jobs just to have shelter and food? Or a livelihood that requires 24/7 attention? When you have to work 18 hours a day, 8 hours of sleep is impossible. I’ve lived it and, thankfully, so has Hersey. She describes the necessary life she had to live through grad school, studying full time, raising her son, writing assignments as well as holding various jobs. For Hersey, rest is not simply taking a nap—although that helps. A rest can be gazing out the window on the bus, pausing at the cash register to breathe while the customer gets their order ready. 

She suggests, for example, asking yourself as you wake up when you’ll be able to take moments to rest that day. We rest not because we need to, but because our bodies were built for it, we deserve it, it is a divine right. But we live in a world where rest has been sidelined, so the work of resistance is to reclaim rest as a part of regular life. 

There are so many truth bombs in this little book. If you want a taste, go to her social media pages @thenapministry. I’m going to share three that caught my attention (so hard to pick three). If you read the book or her socials, I’d love to hear what catches you.

“Release the shame you feel when resting. It does not belong to you.”

Knowing how hard my mother worked to keep my brother and me sheltered, fed, and somewhat flourishing, I put her on this pedestal as the hardest worker I ever knew. I told myself that however hard I was working, I was not working as hard as Mom did. I was also in a field (ministry) where overwork is a sign of God’s blessing and your necessity in people’s lives. So I was not only not keeping up with the ideal I had of Mom, but also surrounded by colleagues all working way too much for way too little. Anytime I got one good day off, let alone two, in a week, I was relieved and also full of shame. If I have this much time off, I’d think, clearly I am not working hard enough. Hersey says that shame does not belong to me. She is right. The thing is, Mom never called me lazy. She always noticed me working hard and often told me to get home earlier and get away sometimes. There is a lot behind that shame: gender roles, capitalism, family history. My work now is learning to set that shame aside.

“One day I hope we can all deprogram from the lie that rest, silence, and pausing is a luxury and privilege. It is not! The systems manipulated you to believe it is true. The systems have been lying and guiding us all blindly to urgent and unsustainable fantasies.”

In my community many workers made their living from the land or the water. Those who did not own their own farm, boat, or woods worked in plants and mills. Stamping a time card means you rest when the horn blows. It teaches us to push rest to a convenient time that does not disrupt our work. Now, I loved working at the potato warehouse. The owners treated us like family and my co-workers were great fun. But I still feel the need to wait just 10 more minutes to use the bathroom at the top of the hour. It’s a deeply entrenched idea of human labour and human worth that we all share.

“The Rest Is Resistance framework also does not believe in the toxic idea that we are resting to recharge and rejuvenate so we can be prepared to give more output to capitalism.”

When people would ask me to pray for them when they were sick, I used to pray something like this, “May you be filled with the healing of the Holy Spirit and come to know the fulfillment of serving God as you are called.” It’s not an awful prayer. I’ve prayed worse. But it still makes me cringe, as if the person will not be fulfilled until they are “serving” again. It was also pretty ableist, as if one can not serve God from a sick bed! 

We do not rest to be more productive. We do not heal in order to get back to work. We do not take care of ourselves to make ourselves better workers. We rest, recover, and practice self-care because it is our divine right. 

God rested on the seventh day. The sabbath is not a reward, but a commandment. Jesus was often reclining and resting alone or with friends, even sleeping through a storm while his friends bailed out the boat!

As I absorbed my elders’ example of hard work, I missed another valuable lesson: the value of rest. Most of my life when I remembered these folks they were in tractors, warehouses, forests, and boats. Now I look back and I also see them resting. I see my stepfather “resting his eyes” when he came home for lunch. I see a woman sending peeled and separated oranges in ziploc bags to her husband and sons so they could safely eat them while driving the tractor. I see my mom able to just sit in a chair in silence for 20-30 minutes without getting bored or fidgety. And I see many cups of tea and coffee at tables where we unwound and supported each other. 

I wonder how this sounds to you. Does it sound like enough, or too much, or too little? Can you imagine taking a little more rest than you do now, even just a 20 second deep breath a few times a day? What are some ideas you grew up with about work and rest that have carried into your adulthood? Let me know.