Resting

Photo by Aleksandar Cvetanovic on Unsplash

I was thinking about resting today, since it is Sunday. I've been trying to take Sundays off, with mediocre success (as evident by the fact that I'm currently writing). Now that the young people are no longer young children, the household rhythm has changed on weekends. We're no longer constantly on call, and so Sunday can be a day of rest. A sort of Sabbath, if you will.

But then I thought about the word rest, and the two meanings it has. One meaning is to rest, to cease work. The other meaning is the remainder--all the rest--an indistinguishable mass of "other". I thought perhaps that's why we don't love resting, because it lumps us in with "all the rest", and we want to be special. We also think that if we work hard enough, we will get to be special. History will remember us. In truth, I would bet that cemeteries are full of people who worked hard, and no one knows who they were because they didn't catch that lucky break. But it could be that we dislike the word rest because it came from the word for grave (a resting place), and we just don't like to think about death.