There are moments in life that stop you mid-step. Not the dramatic ones — the quiet ones. The ordinary Tuesday afternoon when you realize you are still standing at five o’clock, still present, still here. Still lit from within. This is one of those moments, and I want to tell you about it.
Living a lifelong self-noticing practice is one of the greatest gifts I have given myself. Staying awake to my feelings, sensations, and inner musings, even when what surfaces is difficult to hold, has always served me far better than stuffing or compartmentalizing the peaks and valleys of this life.
What has my attention these days is something I didn’t expect to feel again: energy. Real, steady, end-of-the-day energy.
A few years ago, during some of the harder seasons of my life, I stopped listening to my inner wisdom. I worked beyond what my body was quietly, persistently asking me to honor, and in doing so, I slid into a burnout that took far longer to climb out of than I ever anticipated. What I learned, the hard way, is that burnout doesn’t arrive all at once. It builds in the small moments we override what we know to be true. And once it takes hold, recovery is slow, humbling, and deeply nonlinear.
So bit by bit, I found my way through the chronic fatigue with a dedicated rest practice, which I now call my Brave Rest practice. I use the word brave deliberately. When you are chronically tired, rest is often the hardest thing to choose. So many of us, myself very much included, use activity as a way to avoid feeling what feels tender, frightening, or unresolved. Lying down in an intentional, daily rest practice was, for me, one of the most courageous things I have ever done.
And lately, I feel the recovery. Not just sense it or hope for it. I feel it.
For so long, my energy would quietly leave me around one o’clock in the afternoon. There were days when I was out and couldn’t safely drive home because exhaustion had moved in like weather, heavy and sudden. I would scan my surroundings, wondering where I could pull over or rest, calculating how far I had to go.
And now? I reach the end of the day, and there is still something left. A flicker. Sometimes more than a flicker. I notice it with this quiet, almost disbelieving delight and feel the full weight of what that means.
Rest did this. Brave, steady, unglamorous, daily rest. It did not happen overnight, and there were many afternoons I doubted it ever would. But the body knows how to return to itself when we finally permit it. Mine has been finding its way back, slowly and surely, like the tide that always comes in no matter how long the shore has waited.
If you are somewhere in the middle of your own exhaustion right now, I want you to know that this is not the whole story. There is more on the other side. I am living proof.
With love, from my corner by the sea.
