I remember an idyllic time in the distant early history of my life when the people around me figured out how to integrate rest into my daily experience.

This was, of course, in preschool. We had nap time as a part of every day. It was brilliant. There was a time every day when everybody got together and rested together. It was as if it was as fundamental as anything else that was happening, that we needed to rest.

I fortunately remembered this when I was in my mid-twenties and I was in a corporate job and working in an office building in a cubicle. There was a part of the office floor where there were empty cubicles, and after lunch I would do this clever thing of going off to the empty cubicles, curling up underneath one of the desks in my suit, and just napping. I knew that I needed it, and it unfortunately did not seem to be built into the schedule of the corporate workday, so I created it for myself.

Rest is so important for us in a society that emphasizes productivity, that has us evaluate our worth on the basis of our accomplishments. For a lot of us, we really think that we are what we do. For many men in particular, we've come to think of ourselves as sort of success objects. What we are is a function of what we've accomplished and what we can say we've done. And so we don't build into our sense of our modern life, and how to live, that there's this correct balance between productivity, and rest.

So for a lot of us, we figure out how to do this naturally. It's like there's this balance between the work that we do to produce things, and the time that we get to spend enjoying, or consuming, the things that other people have produced. So for a lot of people, a natural way to do that is to gravitate, say, toward television programs. That's something that someone else has produced, and it can be replenishing to just take time where you're passive and you get to take that in and enjoy that for yourself.

For some of us, that's reading books. Or spending time with other people's kids. You didn't have to do the work of raising those kids. Other people did that work.

You just get to enjoy the fruits of other people's labors and get to spend time with young people and be nourished and replenished by that experience.

But the thing that we do less of is figuring out how to get a kind of rest that isn't filled up with something. Rest where there's nothing going on. Adyashanti, who's a local, contemporary, enlightened dude, talks about meditation sometimes as "doing nothing time". You know, it doesn't really matter what kind of meditation you do, as long as you build in some time for yourself where you're doing nothing. There's just space.

There's just room. So there's a kind of quality of rest that exists there that doesn't necessarily happen if all you're doing is filling your time with diversions, or leisure activities, where there's still activity going on.

For me, I know I get a really kind of quality rest, for instance, when I'm in nature. And so time in nature is essential to me. It's not the quantity of time. It's the quality of the rest that I get when I'm there.

I figured out even that I sometimes need to just lie on my back on the floor and look up at the ceiling for a few minutes, and do nothing. And that resets me.

Building in that kind of quality of rest can really change the ecology of our beings. We're like natural ecological systems. And those systems need a particular balance. And rest is part of it.

If you can just trust that your system, your energetic system, knows what it needs, you'll give yourself the chance to rest, as much as you need. Not just as much as you think is acceptable, but as much as you actually need. Some people need a lot of it.

In fact, the experience that some people call depression is often really just a need for a lot of rest. People just need to do nothing, for a long time, as much as they can, and they just don't think that's acceptable, and so they think there's a problem, that they're not motivated enough. Really, they just need a lot of rest.

It's like in the Jewish Sabbath, the concept is that every seven days there's a day of rest, where you say everything that you could possibly do during the week has been done, and now it's time to put it aside for a day and do nothing. And so people spend a day of rest every seven days. And in fact, in Hebrew scripture, there's talk of a sabbatical year every seven years.

And this is somewhat a reference to agriculture, and letting the land lie fallow every year for seven years so that it can replenish itself and restore. But it also is a reference to how the ecology of ourselves work, that there may be a year of rest that you need every seven years, and that's certainly not the kind of rest that we tend to give ourselves in modern society.

So I encourage you to figure out, do you get as much rest as you really need? It's really important that you do. Can you give it to yourself? Thanks for spending a few minutes with me, and it's time for my nap now.