What We Are Reading: Rest is Resistance
by Tricia Hersey
Article by Dr. Sabrina Carolina Sideris, Director, The INVST Program
sabrina.sideris@colorado.edu
www.colorado.edu/invst
On Instagram: @invstcu
The INVST Program is a 33-year-old leadership training program at CU Boulder with a focus on community, social justice, and activism for sustainability. We offer community-based learning for eco-social transformation. Process is important to us. Relationship building is our highest priority. We believe that justice and sustainability are possible and we look to changemakers who are bringing that into reality every day, everywhere. With well over 400 alumni, we draw inspiration from members of the INVST family who have chosen to work as elected officials, judges, pro-bono lawyers, urban planners, caregivers, educators, wellness practitioners, small business owners, social movement leaders, parents, and creatives. They work to bring about positive eco-social change as a lifetime commitment.
The INVST Antiracism Study Group recently read Rest is Resistance by Tricia Hersey. We enjoyed it so much, some of us even went back and read it a second time.
An important set of ideas to contemplate as we begin summer break, Rest is Resistance distinguishes self care and wellness from rest.
Rest is actually activism! It is not an activity like yoga, swimming, hiking, or travel. Of course rest can occur while someone is doing fun outdoor activities in Colorado. What rest is is getting quiet and still so you can REALLY hear your inner voice, the wisdom that has been growing inside you all along, the inner knowing that has been passed along by those who raised you, nurtured you, taught you, those who lived long before you were born. Particularly for folks who have experienced historical oppression due to their identities, to rest is to resist a harmful set of structures and norms.
We’ve got access to all kinds of wisdom that does not look like information. In college, we exchange facts and delve into books and articles, write papers, take exams. We perform by sharing what we know through presentations. And we do lots of this! Grind culture keeps us in a state of exhaustion. In that tired state, learning can become a series of motions we go through. Accomplishing goals, placing check marks next to items on our to-do list, saying yes to all the invitations we receive … but are we fully saying YES to any one of these things? When was the last time you gave your undivided attention to the endeavor of thinking hard about who you really are, how you can support your community in the way it most needs you, and how you can agitate for transformative, inconvenient justice?
Hersey says, when we put people to sleep, we are waking them up. She asks, how will your ancestors speak to you in your dreams if you never take naps? How can we tap into states of discovery and creativity without daydreaming? As leaders, we are not just called upon to fulfill goals and complete tasks. We are asked to be visionary guides for our communities who are struggling to solve urgent, complex, knotty, confusing problems. Only by resting deeply and dreaming, and by integrating this healthy habit into a lifelong commitment to changemaking, can we be available to the most creative parts of ourselves when they arrive, when they speak to us, when they call us forth.
“There has been no space for any of us to dream of anything outside of
what we have been born into. To hear the simple and bold proclamation,
‘You are doing too much. You can rest. You can just be. You can be’
is revolutionary. To believe it and continue to dream up ways to feel and find rest, care, and healing is liberation.”
–Tricia Hersey, The Nap Minister
As summer break arrives, the CU leadership community might want to consider integrating the following into our lives:
- Just sit down for half an hour and do absolutely nothing
- Stare off into space
- Contemplate the way the grass looks when the breeze blows across it
- Dream
- Make a “Not To Do” list
- Silence the alerts that ding and ring
- Spend a full day without looking at a screen
- Take an app off of your phone
- Daydream
- Find a rest role model like Tricia Hersey, The Nap Minister
- Become a rest role model by telling others: when you are unabashedly resting, they cannot interrupt you with work!
What would happen if all of us were well rested, tapping into our imaginations, playing and experiencing pleasure, and capable of imagining a different world?
Young people in college who study leadership are frequently go-getters who fill their days with action and activity, never pausing. We tell ourselves we will rest after the school year ends. We tell ourselves we will rest after graduation. Professors tell ourselves we will rest when we finally earn tenure or when we’re on sabbatical. But our daily habits in college set in motion our lifetimes as leaders. What young leaders do every day with their time, attention, and energy could very well determine how they will live out their adulthoods.
We must learn lessons about rest as resistance -- particularly in a white supremacist, toxically capitalist society where the grind is so often glorified and normalized. Rest is Resistance is NOT about wellness. It is about refusing work as a form of resistance, as an uprising, since work in this nation’s history -- especially for enslaved Black people -- has been associated with force, violence, family separation, and dehumanization. To stop working is to resist and to carve out space for dreaming of a future that attempts to finally heal that past.
If you’d like to put this book by Tricia Hersey at the top of your summer reading list, buy it from a Black-owned small business such as Semicolon Bookstore or Mahogany Books. Enjoy your daydreams!
The INVST Antiracism Study Group meets on Thursday from 12:30-1:30 pm MT on Zoom at Meeting ID 356 200 9142. All are welcome, regardless of whether you’re associated with INVST or CU Boulder. We’d love to have you. Write to invst@colorado.edu to seek more information.