Read time: approximately 11 minutes

This week

• Mon, 13 Oct went to Oslo to observe a Storyline training for elementary teachers-in-training
• Tues, 14 Oct facilitated two slang workshops (the first of their kind!) at Kirkeparken Videregående Skole in Moss (it’s pronounced sheer kuh park en; it means church. do you hear it?!)
• Wed, 15 Oct observed a colleague using a method of teaching French language learners a method taught to her by a former Rover
• Thu, 16 Oct went to the moves to catch One Battle After Another
• Fri, 17 Oct met with a colleague in the English department to serve as a thought partner on a sociolinguistics course for teachers-in-training she’s planning for the Spring term
• Fri, 17 Oct—Sun, 19 Oct weekend trip to Göteborg, Sweden!

I’m getting a lot of rest in Norway. Don’t hate. I’m just stating facts. I’m getting this much rest partly because this is the first time in 20 years I have lived by myself, which doesn’t just mean I am the only being in my house. It also means that I am the only one I have to take care of. I’ve written in other posts that I enjoy the bustle of a full house and caring for others. But oftentimes in the attention to others I neglect attention to myself. So this time away has been an opportunity for me to turn my attention to myself, to turn inward. To work on becoming a better version of myself while not having to worry that I am neglecting others in order to do so. 

When I was chatting with a writing partner this week I was reminded of How to Do Nothing, a book she recommended last fall when she was on sabbatical and I had the term off from teaching to write. I haven’t had a chance to read it, but I think this season of rest might be the time to do so (just borrowed it on my Libby app). I’ve read a couple of times Rest is Resistance, which, based on descriptions of How to Do Nothing, might be a parallel book. I wonder what it would be like to read Rest is Resistance again, here, alongside How to Do Nothing, when I think I finally am coming to understand what it means to rest and why and how I must do so. 

Hersey (author of Rest is Resistance) has noted that rest is more than naps; it’s about connecting body and mind. I tell students all the time that they’re not just heads on sticks—they are embodied persons. What I mean for them is that their feelings matter as they do their coursework and research. I am mindful of that as well for my own research and in my teaching. But I feel like there’s something more to it as I try to understand myself as embodied. I think perhaps I want to use this time of rest to turn my attention inward, to learn how to pay attention to my self and my body, to ask what I need and how I’m feeling, and to help me figure out how to get there. 

One of the things I want to learn how to do, or perhaps re-learn because surely I must have known how to do this at one point in my life, is to listen to what my body needs and wants and to just give it that. But willingly and openly. Rather than force it me (why am I talking about my body as separate from my self?) to do things. 

I force my body to do a lot of things. When I don’t get enough sleep, for example, I force myself awake when my alarm goes off and then caffeinate my body to trick it into thinking we are awake. But my body will revolt. If enough consecutive nights go by and I deprive my body of sufficient sleep, my body will prevent me from waking up (again with the body and self split). I’ll miss the alarm and oversleep, getting instead the amount of sleep my body needs. Last fall when I wasn’t teaching I managed to get 7-8 hours of sleep a night. I’m managing to do the same here. It took about two months to get my body feeling rested, and I find myself waking up many mornings right before my alarm is scheduled to go off. 

But it’s not just more sleep I’m getting here. That’s one part of rest. My mind is also able to rest here. My shoulders and back are able to rest here. Part of that is because I don’t have to encounter daily the magnificent dumpster fire of the United States. When I’m in the US, I can select which news to watch and read, but unlike in the US, what’s happening is not directly affecting me or those I work with or students I teach. I know it’s affecting all of those I love and care for in the US. And I can’t stress myself over what I cannot do from here. So it turns out that I don’t have as much emotional and psychological labor as I do in the States just to get through a day. Trust, I still encounter racial aggressions, but at least here the government isn’t trying to destroy democracy. I know my US friends and colleagues are working hard to fight, and I will too when I get back. But that’s not my role this year.  

I’m reminded of Toni Morrison’s talk at Portland State University in 1975 where she said, “The function, the very serious function of racism is distraction. It keeps you from doing your work. It keeps you explaining, over and over again, your reason for being. Somebody says you have no language and you spend twenty years proving that you do. Somebody says your head isn’t shaped properly so you have scientists working on the fact that it is. Somebody says you have no art, so you dredge that up. Somebody says you have no kingdoms, so you dredge that up. None of this is necessary. There will always be one more thing.” And Morrison didn’t play. She didn’t find the need to explain herself or suffer fools. I don’t know what that felt like for her, but perhaps this stance allowed her to free herself from that kind of labor. So she could focus on and prioritize the labor that was important to her. 

I am lucky enough to feel now what it’s like to have some of that labor lifted. And I don’t take for granted that I have this privilege and opportunity and that I might never have again and that my friends and colleagues don’t have this time away. 

Not having to worry directly about existential threats to my livelihood and personhood is opening up a new realm of experiences I am exploring. Have you ever walked by someone sitting on a park bench or at a café reading, just reading and doing nothing else, and thought, I would love to have that kind of time where I can spend more than five minutes at a time reading? Looking for what a former student called “margins of the day” to read? Especially if it’s not a book for work. It’s a dream for me to sit and read for myself. I tried both this weekend—the park bench and the café—and I can tell you it was just as glorious as I imagined it would be. I cannot recall a time where I ever just sat in a public place and read. 

Or have you ever thought, I would just love to go to the movies on a weeknight? I did that too this week and it was equally glorious. Also because I realized how much I needed to just watch images of America and listen to American English for two hours straight to help cure some homesickness (I saw One Battle After Another and it did not disappoint, but was also complicated and made me cry in ways I can’t yet quite explain). 

This weekend, at the last minute, I decided to take a weekend trip to Göteborg, Sweden. Göteborg is Sweden’s second largest city (behind Stockholm) and is just a 2-hour train ride south from my house (Oslo is approximately the same distance, but north). I was looking at my calendar to figure out when I could visit some cousins in Denmark and they couldn’t host me this weekend, but I was available to travel, so I thought, I’ll go to Sweden instead. 

And let me tell you—I was nervous to go. Because sometimes it’s hard for me to be brave. I like having control of all situations. It’s easier—and in my realm of control—to do what I’m used to doing on the weekends: lounge about my house, run errands, prep for the week. It’s hard to go to a new place and not know everything that’s going to happen. Where they speak a language I don’t quite understand. Where neither my work phone nor my personal phone work. But then I thought, I can do hard things, and this isn’t really that hard. I need to not have total control all the time. I can have an adventure! I need to do things that frighten me. I need to practice being brave. My brother gave me information while I was on the train about how to add an eSim to my phone so that I could have internet. I knew that I would enjoy the trip: enjoy the opportunity to just hop on a train and travel because it turns out I live in Europe (this still amazes me!). And I knew that I would be bummed if I didn’t take the chance to travel when I could. And the trip was awesome, 6 out of 6 as they say in Norway, so glad I did it. 

This is a different way of listening to my body. I was nervous to travel to Sweden, but did it anyway, and I’m glad I did and I knew I would be glad to travel and regret it if I didn’t. 

On Saturday when I thought, I’m just going to spend 8 hours wandering this city with a vague sense of where I want to go, I just kind of moved where my body said to move. I was on my way to get some pasta for supper and walked past a Thai noodle shop. I walked up the street, looked up reviews of the place, compared them to reviews of an Italian place I was headed to, and walked back to the Thai place after debating whether or not I would regret it if I didn’t go. I’m glad I went—the food was delicious and it was great to be able to speak Thai. They even gave me the menu written only in Thai, that had different food on it than the restaurant menu. That was incredible and has never happened to me before in my life!

Anyway, I want to learn how to listen to myself, to relinquish control, and to not feel guilty when I want to move in ways counter to the ways people, or even I, might expect me to move. I don’t quite know what this means yet, but I want to learn how to do it. I want to practice doing it, so when I get back Stateside I can do it when there are the added pressures of doing stuff all the time, of being busy all the time, of working through horror all the time. I want to practice now ways to do for myself, so that I can do for others. I want to learn how to rest. I want to learn how to do nothing. So that it can open up possibilities of how to be and move and do instead.