What my mother taught me about rest, long before I knew I was learning
This week, David and I came to Florida to visit my mom.
My mother is the only person who has known me my entire life. Sixty-six years of being her daughter. She has been my greatest teacher, though not always gently. We have been close and distant; we have held each other and challenged each other, and somehow it has all been the same love.
I think about how many versions of us there have been. The young mother and the little girl who wanted nothing more than to be near her. The years when I needed distance to figure out who I was apart from her. The years we circled each other, two strong women who loved each other fiercely and did not always know how to say so. And now this version, which feels like the softest one yet. Time has a way of sanding down the edges. What remains is mostly gratitude.
At 97, she is a stellar example of what aging can look like when you are strong enough, healthy enough, and brave enough to keep going even as the machinery begins to fail. Her body has its complaints, and she does not pretend otherwise. But her mind is clear. Her wit is quick. A spark still burns in her, and you feel it the moment you walk in the door.
The older I get, the more I believe oldness is a state of mind. I have known people who were old at fifty, who had quietly decided the best of life was behind them and stopped reaching for anything new. And I have known people like my mother, who at nearly a century is still curious about what comes next. You are either in the game of life or you are not. My mother is still very much in it.
On this recent visit, I noticed how she stays in the game. It is not that she has more energy than anyone else at 97. She knows what her energy is worth. She chooses carefully where it goes. She will say yes to an outing, a meal out, a long conversation that wanders through the decades, and she will be fully there for all of it, curious and funny and sharp. And then, without a trace of apology, she will tell us she needs to rest. She closes the door and lies down, not because she is giving up on the day, but because she wants to have something left for the rest of it. When she comes back, she is bright again, as if she has quietly refilled a well the rest of us forget we even have.
I used to read that as a limitation. For years I was the one pushing through, proud of how much I could carry and how long I could go before I let myself stop. I built a life on being capable. Rest was something I earned, and usually something I postponed until the work was done, which of course it never was. I told myself I would slow down later. Later kept moving further away.
It took my own body asking louder and louder before I finally listened, and even then it felt like surrender. Lying down in the middle of the day felt like failing at something. Only later did I understand surrender was the doorway.
That rest wasn’t the absence of my life, but the ground it grows from.
Now I am a rester. It is the heart of my work and, more truthfully, the heart of how I want to live. I guide people toward rest, and I’m still learning about it in my own body, one afternoon at a time. And sitting across from my mother this week, I had the strangest, sweetest thought. Maybe discovering this rest practice wasn’t new to my life. Maybe I have been watching it my whole life and simply was not ready to see it.
My Mom knows something I spent decades learning: that the spark and the rest are not opposites. One makes the other possible. Her yes to life is only as strong as her yes to rest. She does not rest because she is old. She rests so she can keep living the way she wants to live.
All summer I wrote about the spiritual savings account, the practice of depositing rest and joy instead of draining ourselves to empty. My mother has been keeping that account her whole life, long before anyone gave it a name. She never called it self-care. She would probably laugh at the phrase. She just knew when she had given enough and needed to take some back. At 97, she is living on the interest.
One afternoon I watched her close her door and felt something soften in me. Not worry, not the old impatience I might once have felt, wanting her to stay just a little longer. Just a quiet respect. She was not leaving the game. She was making sure she could stay in it. I sat with David in the stillness of her home and thought about how lucky I am to still be her student, still being shown the way.
I do not know how many more visits like this we will have. None of us do, at any age. But I know I will carry this one home with me. The image of her door closing gently in the afternoon, and opening again later with that same spark on the other side.
So this is what I am bringing back to my corner of the world, and what I want to share with you, my dear friend. I hope you have a door you can close when you need to. I hope you let yourself rest without explaining it to anyone, even yourself. And I hope that when you open the door again, you find your own spark waiting for you, the way my mother finds hers, every single afternoon.
Forever and always, love from my corner.
❥ Sarah
