It might seem counterintuitive to dive into the topic of rest at the beginning of a busy season, but I believe there’s no better time for a refresher on rest than on the cusp of what could be chaos if not managed with intent and care.

For many years, I put rest on the back burner. It was what I ‘earned’ after putting in enough effort. I viewed rest as indulgent when life was clipping along at a steady pace and necessary when burnout hit. But only more recently have I begun to view rest with more reverence. Perhaps this is as a result of entering my 40’s and realizing with renewed perspective that time and health are both precious and precarious. I’ve become so much more aware of how rest is key to sustaining and stewarding the health, relationships, and time I’ve been granted. Rest is where I need to begin, not where I wind up.

Maybe you’re curious as to what that means and how that looks in real life. That’s something I’ve been attempting to define and navigate over the past couple of years. One thing I keep returning to is this intuitive sense that I need to put rest at the forefront of my scheduling, which has required a mindset shift.

When considering the season ahead, I now consider how much rest I/our family will require and plan our schedule accordingly, instead of fitting rest in amidst the busy days and weeks. I have begun thinking of my weekend as a time of rest that fuels my creative work of parenting, homeschooling, and running a business throughout the week, rather than aiming for the weekend in order to recover. Each day’s schedule begins with planning times of rest throughout my day before I insert all the to-do’s. I’m realizing that time spent ‘being’ is just as (if not more) critical to success as my time spent ‘doing’.

If flipping the script of earning our rest is intriguing to you, here are a few things you can do to integrate a more ‘slow living’ approach with rest as the core rather than the afterthought in your schedule.

• Plan for one weekend a month and one day a week to be open-ended, leaving margin in your calendar. Just seeing or knowing that there is space for rest can reduce anxiety regarding exhaustion.
• Begin each day with something that inspires and fuels you. Journaling, working out, sitting quietly with a Bible or book and cup of tea. Plan for a short break in the afternoon that will fuel the second half of your day – perhaps a walk after lunch, a catnap, or a podcast while puttering in the garden or folding laundry.
• Consider which activities or stimuli in your day/week/month leave you feeling exhausted. Maybe it’s driving in rush hour, a cluttered home, or getting kids out the door for school/practice/activities. Tackling these things following a period of restorative rest leaves me feeling much less drained and far more engaged than when I just fly from one busy/noisy environment to the next.
• Before saying ‘yes’ to a new commitment, decide what you’ll extract from your schedule so that you’re not sacrificing your margin.
• Read up on the value of rest. Here are a couple books that have inspired me over the last while: “Rest: Why You Get More Done When You Work Less” by Alex Soojung-Kim Pang and “The Sleep Revolution” by Arianna Huffington.

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