Variety: Exodus 20v8-11
8 ‘Remember the Sabbath day by keeping it holy. 9 Six days you shall labour and do all your work, 10 but the seventh day is a sabbath to the Lord your God. On it you shall not do any work, neither you, nor your son or daughter, nor your male or female servant, nor your animals, nor any foreigner residing in your towns. 11 For in six days the Lord made the heavens and the earth, the sea, and all that is in them, but he rested on the seventh day. Therefore the Lord blessed the Sabbath day and made it holy. (Exodus 20:8-11)
We are grind culture. Grind culture is our everyday behaviours, expectations, and engagements with each other and the world around us. We have been socialized, manipulated, and indoctrinated by everything in culture to believe the lies of grind culture. In order for a capitalist system to thrive, our false beliefs in productivity and labour must remain. We have internalized its teachings and become zombie-like in Spirit and exhausted in body. So we push ourselves and each other under the guise of being hyper-productive and efficient. From a very young age we begin the slow process of disconnecting from our bodies’ need to rest and are praised when we work ourselves to exhaustion….
Our bodies and Spirits do not belong to capitalism, no matter how it is theorized and presented. Our divinity secures this, and it is our right to claim this boldly. I’m not grinding ever. I trust the Creator and my Ancestors to always make space for my gifts and talents without needing to work myself into exhaustion….
Rest is as natural as breathing and waking up. Rest is part of our nature. Resting is about getting people back to their truest selves. To what they were before capitalism robbed you of your ability to just be. Rest is anything that slows you down enough to allow your body and mind to connect in the deepest way. We must be focus on knowing that our bodies and our worth are not connected to how many things we can check off a list. You can begin to create a “Not-To-Do-List” as you gain the energy to maintain healthy boundaries. Our opportunity to rest and reimagine rest is endless. There is always time to rest when we reimagine.
Tricia Hersey,