🪫 Out of time
Mandy Brown in a wonderfully insightful post about time and how we spend it:
There’s a vocabulary and a mode of talking about rest in the context of work as if rest serves a purpose—that purpose of course being to enable more work. Often this crops up with the metaphor of a battery, with the notion that you are a battery who can expend its energy and then must recharge. I find this curious for what it omits. Rechargeable batteries lose some capacity with each charging cycle, charging less and less each time until they can no longer be charged at all. After some finite number of uses, they are worn out, unusable, not even fit for recycling. Yet somehow that outcome of the battery metaphor is always left unsaid.
This all resonates, but the part about the implicit purpose of rest being to enable more work stand out. We rest so we can work for others and we rest so we can work for ourselves, but how often do we rest for rest's sake? When was the last time you rested without thinking about the work that would allow you to do later?