06/01/2026
This Christmas, I made a deliberate choice to rest.
Fewer plans, less distractions and lots of quiet. I expected relief. What I encountered instead was deep discomfort.
When we live in survival mode, moving quickly, managing responsibilities, orienting ourselves around productivity and urgency, rest can feel profoundly unsettling. The nervous system, so accustomed to doing, does not easily transition into being. Without tasks to complete or problems to solve, we can feel untethered, even lost.
When we finally slow down, it is not uncommon for the feelings that had been kept at bay by busyness to surface.
The holidays can carry a particular weight. For me, it brings the absence of traditions that once anchored me, the ache of family members who are no longer here, and the quiet dislocation of their absence. This year in the stillness, there was no distraction from these feelings. I felt them fully, the sadness, the longing, the sense of something missing.
And yet, something meaningful also happened.
By allowing myself to feel the ache rather than outrun it, I found myself reconnecting. I reached out to an old family friend and asked if we could visit.
She shared my mother’s stories with my children; her memories, her humour, the stories that keep her presence alive. My heart started to heal, the heaviness lifted and I now feel more open to the year ahead.
Perhaps this is another kind of rest: the kind that allows us to metabolise loss, to integrate the past, and to make room for new traditions to form.
It was not comfortable. But it was honest. And in its own quiet way, it was restorative.
Rest, it seems, has become a lost art.
