Sit Down. Rest a While.

You. You down in front. The one tapping your pen against your knee. The one rushing to and fro making sure everyone has a seat and has everything they need for the duration of this speech or film or whatever it is that you’re attending. You. Sit down. Rest a while. Put the pen in your purse or your pocket. Let the other people be. You sit down. You rest.

***

I know who you are because you are me. You have a to-do list that is pages long. You have things to do today, tomorrow, next week, and the week after that. You’re worried about completing some of them. You’re writing notes to yourself about the things you have to do once when you get home from work. You have big projects. You have even bigger dreams, and you aren’t sure if you can or should hold onto them even though you desperately – desperately – want to believe in them. You feel that you are called to some of them. You wonder why some of them capture you so if they aren’t ever meant to be. You feel the grief of trying to part with some of them. You don’t know if you can part with them now or in the future. To you I say:

Sit down. Rest a while.

***

It’s hard. It’s hard to be still, to rest. It’s hard to sit because you are a person who likes to do. You try to expend your energy in the best way possible, but sometimes…sometimes the best way is the way of sitting. The way of resting. The way of listening and remembering exactly to what you have been called. It even sometimes is the way of suffering, the way of pain, the way of stumbling and of asking “why” while knowing that no answer may come during this lifetime. This is the sort of sitting and resting that is asked of you – the sort that requires observation and attentiveness and long-suffering. The sort that leaves you transformed. The sort that is so frightening that you may not be willing to entertain or do it.

***

This is what I ask of you and me: sit down; rest a while.

Image: Steve Slater (CC BY 2.0)