Making Lists [Rest]

“Sleep and rest don’t always look the same!” I caught myself saying to a friend over the last week who told me I looked tired [we always love to hear that one]. It came from a place of concern, but was received with a spirit of just being condescended towards…and I didn’t like hearing it from myself, but I realized yet again what’s been keeping me from living in fullness is oftentimes my own resistance to what rest is.

…funny how that works.

To let you in on a little bit of my life lately, I had another good friend come up to me around 8.30 at night when we were wrapping up a church gathering and said, “Sierra, I know you’re a 90 year old woman trapped in the body of a twenty-six year old - so what time do you want to leave?”

My first instinct was to laugh. Then I got home and thought, “Man, if I’ve been able to hide that for the last three years (to be frank, I thought I was doing a pretty dang good job).. and_____ picked up on it, I should probably see someone about why I’m suffering from brain fog, and skin issues, and my communication levels seem at an all-time low.”

Long story short (truly), turns out my cortisol levels were at an all time high from having mold attack my nervous system the last three years. Go figure. The next steps were to reduce immediate stress from my life (goodbye coffee and a few choice relationships), to detoxify (hello epsom salt and bone broth), and to work on incorporating rest into my daily life (changing what I saw as “rest” - an active run - to something slightly less taxing - i.e., more pilates and meditation). The first two, I succeeded incredibly at. The latter…I mean, it’s hard when your life never stops until your body makes you stop. There’s always one more deadline, one more person to listen to, one more problem to solve, one more job to do, more bills to pay. And then I got pneumonia, and my body stopped for me.

So rest. I’ve always been a doer, but as a type nine, I have always always always craved my rest (even though that often looks different to others’ interpretations of it). But to be honest, I’ve never learned how to switch my brain off - we’ve gotten better over the last four or five years - but completely, it takes an overhaul or something pretty interesting to remove me from my place of busy-ness. Since I’ve always been a doer and a writer, you’d think I would always have been a list-maker, or at least a believer in the list, right? Wrong. It’s only in my routine to have less to think about that I’ve learnt the beauty of making lists.

We live in a world that’s inundated almost constantly with the beauty of the fast-paced life: the mindset of, if you’re not busy doing things, you must be boring. If you’re not working a 9-5 and maxing out your hours, you must be doing something wrong. The reality is, we live in that same world that’s been around over several thousand years, and with all of our technology, we’ve been given the opportunity to work more and harder and faster than previous generations. What once took one person hours or weeks to do can now be accomplished in a few minutes and clicks of a button. Somehow, that’s incorporated itself into our lives as a way to create more work, when it should have translated to us doing less (commence the shock and awe) - and in so doing, create more stress.

Enter, the simple, humble list. Grocery lists have been my favourite way to organize heaps of information in regards to personal health and hormone tracking - what I’m supposed to eat when, on a little note in my phone. But then, it’s become a little weekly priority list: do I need to meet with this person, or do I need to write this email/text this message? What’s higher on the priority list? Who is higher on the priority list; and I know that can be a snobby way to think about it - but in my mind, I know when I look at my week that there are some last-minute spontaneous decisions that I can make much more freely knowing that pieces of an overly-complicated life are in their place because of a list. They help to give our mind a break instead of secretly multi-tasking in the background of a conversation with a friend, or in the middle of a date. This preparation for rest allows you to swap into rest mode and actually focus on the people you care about (yourself included), which allows for deeper connection and actual space for your mental capacity to rest and emotional and spiritual and physical capacity to take over.

Whether it’s the satisfaction of the checklist, the mental irritation that comes with organization, or the liberty of letting some things not be in your control all the time, there’s benefits. And to quote my mother…rest is preparation for what’s to come. What’s more exciting than that?