The Power of Real Rest

            A couple of weeks ago I spent Wednesday afternoon through Saturday morning at New Melleray Abbey, a Trappist monastery an hour and a half away from Iowa City.  I went up there feeling tired and a little frazzled after an intense spate of teaching and while I was there I got completely, radically relaxed.

I spent the whole time lying on the single bed in my plain little room napping, reading – I ploughed through large chunks of at least four books -- staring at the recessed lights in the ceiling, and sleeping for nine hours a night.  Occasionally I got up to sit in the chair in the corner of my room and stare out the window, and I took two showers in the shower stall in my room’s little bathroom.  The showers felt like a big effort, and I postponed them for as long as possible.  At seven-fifty every morning and at noon and six p.m., I went down two flights of stairs to the guest dining room, crossed the floor to the cafeteria area, got a tray and a bowl and a plate, piled globs of farm-raised food – coleslaw, home grown beets, corn, mashed potatoes, greasy baked chicken – on the plate and joined my friend Dave Rogers, my partner for this particular trip to the monastery, at a table.  Sometimes after lunch and dinner I went for walks – with or without Dave -- on the long driveway that circles the big dewdrop-shaped lawn in front of the monastery.  And at five-thirty I went to vespers and at seven-thirty I went to compline – two of seven “hours” celebrated every day by the monks in the long, high-ceilinged, limestone chapel.  Guests can sit in the back of the chapel, cordoned off by a low black wrought-iron fence, and watch the monks chant and pray.  During compline you can leave the guest section and line up at the end of the monks’ line and get a little splat of holy water, and during any part of any of the services you can sing along with the monks, referring to a prayer book which I never figured out how obtain.  I didn’t want to sing the monks’ songs anyway but some other guests did, adding their wavery off-key voices to the deep, soaring, resonating, sometimes-off-key voices of the monks. 

            Going to the monastery seems like an odd way to have fun; the rooms are Spartan, the food is basic, and there isn’t anything much to do.  It’s probably not for everybody, but I absolutely love it.  In fact I crave it, the way you crave some food that contains a vitamin you have a deficiency in.  Time goes slowly at the monastery, at least twice as slowly as it goes anywhere else. When you’re lying on your bed staring up at the ceiling, no email, no phone calls, no errands, no money worries, no chores or pets or needs and wants of other people to distract and annoy and make you anxious, time stretches out before you vast and empty, like an endless snowy field.   You have all the time you could ever need and then some to nap and read, to think and not think. 

And that’s why I want to go there, of course, why I keep going back whenever I can.  It’s the complete rest that comes from the complete removal of everything you have to do and everything you want to do along with the wanting itself, the worrying, the sense that you should be doing something better, faster, more fun, different or differently – it’s the removal of all that, the complete rest that comes when it’s been removed, that’s what I crave.

            The first time I ever went to the monastery – alone, to try to figure out a writing problem in 1994 – someone I knew a little was coming out as I was going in.  “I always hate to leave this place,” he said, yawning.  I think of that now, every time I leave that place.  And every time, as I’m driving the hour and a half back to Iowa City, reentering real life after my few days’ retreat from it, I ask myself, How can I hold onto some of what I get at the monastery in my regular life?

            I believe I’ve figured out the answer to that question, at least part of the answer:  What I need to do is deliberately make space in my days to rest the way I rest when I’m at the monastery.   Really rest.  Rest every part of me, rest my mind as well as my body.  It’s not that easy to do, of course.  It’s a lot easier when there’s something outside yourself keeping you on track, like a monastery where you couldn’t do anything even if you wanted to.  I suppose if you were really addicted to being busy, you could stand outside the monastery guest house and talk on your cell phone for large chunks time and you could spend hours writing emails and surfing the Internet. (When I went to the monastery this time I discovered that I could log on to the monastery’s Internet connection in my room).  But you know you’re not going there for that.  And nobody else is doing it, and you’d be negating your entire purpose in being there by doing it yourself.  And even if you spent some time emailing and talking on your cell phone, you’d still have lots of time left over to rest.

            When you’re on your own at home, immersed in your regular life, it’s a lot harder to put up the kinds of barriers and boundaries to busyness that naturally exist at the monastery (or some place like it, where people go for retreats).  At home it’s nearly impossible to ignore all the shoulds and have-tos, all the worries and guilts and desires and anxieties about what you should be doing that come pouring in like water seeking its own level; almost impossible to ignore your list long enough to do nothing on it, to think that rest is important enough to put on a list and make time for. It’s hard to create even a facsimile of retreat conditions – leading to the retreat state of mind -- in your own home, but it can be done.

It’s gotten easier for me than it used to be.  It used to be that when I got back from the monastery, I’d jump right into the fray and the franticness and not even look back for a moment at how I’d been feeling just a few hours earlier, when I was still wrapped in the monastery’s protective silence and nothing-to-do-ness.  Even though I would have just been telling myself I wanted to hold onto as much of that peace and serenity as I could, all that would be gone in a heartbeat and I wouldn’t even remember it all. 

            Now that I’m harnessing my time and thinking about how to harness it in ever better ways, I’m a lot more consciously aware of what I’m doing from one day to the next, and I’m much more able to hold in my mind the goal of holding onto some of that deep monastery rest.  Not only that, I’m more able to do the resting itself.  I can’t do it for days at a time the way you can at the monastery, but I do it for relatively brief periods – a couple of hours here and there – whenever I can.

            I make a conscious decision to make space -- a certain period of time – to rest.  I write it down in my daily planning book as if it’s something that needs to be done, and when the time comes I do it.  I rest.  To get into the right mood, I think about what I feel like on those long afternoons at the monastery.  I think about how much time I’ve planned for this particular rest time. (I sort of look at it like naptime in kindergarten, except that unlike when I was in kindergarten I love nothing better than the chance to rest and do nothing).  I think about when my rest time is going to end so I don’t have to worry about when it’s going to end, should end, at any other point during it. 

Then I turn off the computer, the telephone, the radio, and everything else.  (I’d turn off the TV if I watched TV, which I don’t).   I turn off my worries, my sense of obligation, my feeling that I should be doing something else.   And I lie there on the daybed in my study, reading, napping, staring up at the ceiling, with time stretching out before me like an empty field, a field with borders and boundaries instead of vast unlimited field like at the monastery, it’s true.  But an empty peaceful restful rejuvenating field nonetheless.