Rest - the Most Important Thing in Life

 Wikipedia describes the author of this week's quotation, Vita Sackville-West as, "an English author and garden designer... a successful novelist, poet and journalist, as well as a prolific letter writer and diarist." Which sounds like quite a busy life. I wonder whether that was why she wrote, "Rest is one of the most important things in life, but how few find it."

I also wonder whether it was her garden designing which enabled her to find true rest. It must have been a complete change from her normal occupations of writing and reading, occupying a quite different part of her heart and mind.

I also find rest and peace in the natural world. I am just home from a fabulous, but very intensive, Ministerial Fellowship conference about white supremacy and the need to practice anti-racism in our lives and in our congregations.  It was a joy to go for a long walk with some friends on the Wednesday afternoon; to enjoy the beautiful Peak District countryside; to simply be, rather than learning and thinking. (Even if we took a wrong turn on the way back from The Barrel and ended up returning to the Nightingale Centre via Foolow!). The views were fabulous and I came back feeling refreshed and reinvigorated.

I believe it is the stimulation we get in our lives that makes the rest so enjoyable. If we sat around doing nothing all day, that would be tedious in the extreme. But if our lives are generally busy, taking time out to truly rest can be so healing for the soul.

How do you find rest?

No Matter How Hard We Work...

 The Austrian philanthropist, Hermann Gmeiner, once wrote, "Everything great in the world only comes about because someone does more than they have to do."

And back in the day, I would have agreed with that wholeheartedly. But not any more... I believe that *many* great things do come about because someone walks the extra mile, puts in the work and makes them happen, but not all.

There are great things that happen which come about through grace, rather than by our own hard work. No matter how hard we try, we cannot make someone fall in love with us, for example. We can be as persuasive as we like, but we cannot change someone's mind, if they have decided to close it against us. However well we plan, something random may happen, which causes our lives to go in a different direction.

I think there is another element at work here, which some of us may call luck or serendipity, but which Christians call grace. I have blogged about my beliefs about the workings of grace in the world here. And whether you call it 'fate', 'karma', 'destiny' 'luck' or 'grace', I believe there is a random force at work in the world, which means that we cannot plan for greatness. 

Which is not to say that we shouldn't do our best to make great things happen, but that there has to be that extra element present to make it so.

Enjoy Life!

 First century Roman philosopher and statesman, Seneca, urges us to "enjoy life! It flees at a rapid pace."

Which is something I have always striven to do. In fact, I have sometimes been accused of being naive, idealistic and teethgrindingly positive, by less optimistic friends. But I would far rather try to see the good in any situation, then to drown in the bad. I consciously try to live in the present moment, neither regretting the past, nor worrying about the future. Well, I try...!

You might say, "That's easy for you to say - you have never known real sorrow, genuine suffering and misery." And it's true, to a certain extent - my life has been incredibly blessed, on the whole. I have a loving husband, two wonderful grown up children, and some very dear friends.

Nevertheless, I am 62. I have not got to this point in my life without being acquainted with sorrow, suffering and misery. I have lost people who were dear to me. I have suffered physical pain. But I have also been blessed with a natural "glass half-full" temperament and have never suffered from either anxiety and depression. Both of which (I know, from sitting with friends who suffer from these) are debilitating and all-consuming.

So I also strive to be compassionate towards those who are suffering, who are miserable, who are anxious, who cannot see the end of the tunnel. Karen Armstrong writes that true compassion is about dethroning the ego and genuinely trying to put ourselves in the other person's place, meeting them where they are, without trying to "make it all better". It's about deep listening, without our own agenda. And it's about doing whatever we can. 

And not being offensively bouncy and upbeat, trying to "cheer people up." Not being Tigger to their Eeyore. Because when someone is suffering, miserable, grieving, ill, the last thing they want is to be slapped on the back and told that it will all be over soon, and to get over it. That is an incredibly unhelpful, offensive (if wellmeaning) way to behave.

(image: Disney, nsc blog)

And so I try to remember Pema Chodron's words, which Brene Brown often quotes, "Compassion is not a relationship between the healer and the wounded. It is a relationship between equals. Only when we know our own darkness well enough can we be present with the darkness of others." Without trying to flip on the light, make it all better.

What is Leisure?

 The 20th century German writer, Otto Flake, once wrote, "We should learn again to turn free time into leisure." And the German/English translator on Google wanted to make "Freizeit" (free time) and Musse (leisure) synonyms.

So what is the difference? I would define "free time" as a period in which we can choose what we want to do. But when I think of "leisure", I think of something more purposeful. We may spend our free time, doing nothing in particular - blobbing in front of the telly, mindlessly browsing our phones. Or simply resting. 

I Googled "leisure" and, in the way Google has, it gave me alternative searches to follow, including "leisure as a psychological condition". Which sounded interesting, so I clicked on it. And found this wonderful definition (anonymous), which sharply delineates the difference between free time and leisure: "Leisure defined as a psychological condition means an opportunity for achieving fulfilment in life... Maintains that if work is enjoyable, leisure will become an extension of it."

And I realised that I love (and live by) leisure as "an opportunity for achieving fulfilment in life". Most of my free time is spent either writing or crocheting, which some would call hard work, but which I find fulfiling. I actively dislike sitting around doing nothing. Even when I watch TV, I am crocheting, more often than not. And often have the TV or the radio on in the background while I crochet, to occupy that part of my mind not filled with the work in my hands.

And I see writing as a huge opportunity for achieving fulfilment. When I tell people that I get up at six each morning, so that I have time to write for an hour before I start work, they look at me as though I am mad. But I really enjoy writing, and agree with Liz Gilbert that the definition of the writer as a suffering artist is a toxic one. Writing is fun for me! Yes, it is hard work too, but I absolutely love it.

What do you do for leisure?

The Mystery that is Humankind

 The 18th century German philosopher, Immanuel Kant, once wrote, "The depths of the human heart are unfathomable."

And that is so true. However well we know someone (or believe we know someone), we cannot *know* for certain what is in their mind, let alone in their heart. 

In the coursebook for the Great Course, Writing Great Fiction, Storytelling Tips and Techniques, Professor James Hynes comments that real people are much more complex than the most complicated fictional character. Because authors can choose to take us inside the heads of their characters. Which is not an option for real people. He writes, "We know the people in our lives by what they look like, what they say, what they do, and what other people tell us about them... Consider the fleeting and digressive nature of your own inner life. Then, consider how impossible it would be to express that inner life to another person. Remember, too, that every other person in the world is experiencing the same kind of inner life, all the time. You quickly realize that each of us is alone in the universe inside our heads, surrounded by many other universes with which we can communicate only indirectly."

"Each of us is alone in the universe inside our heads." That is quite a sobering thought. Aside from the few people who have the power of telepathy, it is not possible for the vast majority of us to know what another person is thinking, let alone what they are feeling.

But, by using our powers of empathy and compassion, by truly listening to the other person, by observing their body language (that great non-verbal aspect of communication), we can make an educated guess. It is up to us to do this hard work, to not judge others purely by "what they look like, what they say, what they do, and what other people tell us about them." Because this will inevitably be a superficial judgement. It is only when we listen to others with compassion in our hearts, that we might begin to fathom the mystery that is at the heart of every other person in the world.

Height Wants To Be Climbed

 This week's quotation, by the early 20th century German writer and poet, Paul Richard Luck, reads,  "Height cannot be given, but it wants to be climbed."

"Height... wants to be climbed." I guess he means that we often view an upward path as a challenge, and that we will only be able to see what is at the top, once we have made the effort of climbing it. Nothing comes for free - "height cannot be given". 

Except when it can... I can still remember my huge sense of indignation as a child, when we had climbed Mount Snowdon in North Wales, and found the summit buzzing with tourists who had caught the train up from Llanberis, four and a half snaking miles below. I felt they had cheated, by not climbing the mountain as we had done.

But generally, we cannot attain the heights without doing some hard work to get there. As Luck said, "height cannot be given." And this is true of any field of human endeavour, much though we might wish it were otherwise. For example, I would love to be able to play the piano as well as a concert pianist, but I know that this will never happen without daily hours of practice over a long period of time. And it's not a sufficiently high priority for me, so I don't have the motivation to put in the necessary work.

Writing, on the other hand, is a priority, and I practice my craft for at least an hour each day (this is fiction / creative non-fiction writing rather than the writing I do as part of my role as a Unitarian minister). And because I have put in the time and effort, my writing is beginning to improve. Like most writers, I will never be completely satisfied with it, because it's always possible to do better. Sometimes, I read the words of others - writers I admire, such as George Eliot, Joseph Conrad, J.R.R. Tolkien and Terry Pratchett - and just sigh quietly to myself. Because I will probably never write as well as they do. But by constant pracice, I can get better, can learn to find my own voice.

I believe there is something in every human being, which impels us towards the heights. Which fills us with motivation and enthusiasm for our chosen vocation (whatever that is), so that we don't mind putting the work in, so long as it gets us a little closer to those seemingly unattainable heights. Which makes us strive to do the best we can, each day.

And I don't think it is ambition, although that is part of it. I think it is something purer, something more selfless, something we experience through grace. If attaining our own personal "height" is sufficiently important to us, we will carry on plodding upwards, one step at a time, because it is natural to follow the best we know, to do our best to reach the elusive heights.

Planted Towns

 My dear husband and I are on holiday in the Cotswolds this week. On our first day, we visited Northleach, a charming little town with a beautiful church. And discovered that it is one of several 'planted towns' in the Cotswolds - others including Chipping Campden, Moreton in Marsh, Stow on the Wold, Burford, Wooton Under Edge and Chipping Sodbury. 

According to the helpful leaflet we picked up, from which the map above is taken, "hundreds of such market towns were 'planted' in England and Wales following the Norman conquest in 1066, producing a network allowing people to journey to and from market in a single day."

Who knew that town planning and the concept of 'new towns' went back that far? I certainly didn't. There was a fascinating display explaining the features of planted towns inside Northleach's magnificent church, St Peter and St Paul, which is one of the Cotswold "wool churches" built by wealthy wool merchants. We have visited several examples this week.

Perhaps most people know about this phenomenon, and it was merely my ignorance that I did not. But my husband, who has a town planning degree, hadn't either.

The quotation from Ecclesiastes that keeps running through my head is, "There is nothing new under the sun." So the much vaunted 'new towns' post war, such as Harlow and Basildon and Milton Keynes, are only a reinvention of a much older planning solution - the planted town. And both planted towns and new towns have been successful because they were situated wisely, where they would be of benefit to their inhabitants - the planted towns to enable easier journeys to market from the surrounding countryside, the new towns to house the burgeoning populations of our 20th and 21st century cities.

And I know that some Christian denominations plant ministries to bring their particular brand of Christianity to new places. Perhaps Unitarians might do the same? I know of a couple of examples...