Time outside of time, and resting.

I've said to a lot of people that this is the fastest year I've ever lived. And that I'm trying to find a time elf who can help me slow it down because it's getting ridiculous. I wake up in the morning and five minutes later it's night again and the days feel like strobe lights.

I still have not found a time elf (though I think I'm getting closer).

But I have found a little bubble of no-time. It's kind of like a weird liminal time-outside-time that feels kind of like a sigh.

Unfortunately, I'm in this time bubble because I currently am unwell with a fever and a dripping nose.

Fortunately, being sick is teaching me some interesting things about time and about rest.

Illness has its own timeline that doesn't care at all what I think, so for the duration that it's shunted me out of regular time, I can either fight it or roll with it.

Yesterday I fought it. Not really intentionally, but my default setting is a kind of low-key stress caused by the looming tower of all the things I want to have done by the end of my life. A kind of endless forward agitation that's so ingrained that mostly I don't notice it's there. I think it's also partly a symptom of the world we live in.

Yesterday, even though I stayed in bed reading most of the day, it didn't feel particularly restful. So then I started thinking about why not, and what rest even is. Along with "time is going too fast", "I don't know how to rest" is another thing I say a fair bit. What is rest? How do I know if I'm doing it? It's not a thing I can touch or taste. I'm either doing things or I'm collapsing, skating a fine line along the edge of burnout, and burnout is not rest.

There are a lot of things that make rest hard to access for a lot of people, not just me - dysregulated nervous systems that struggle sometimes to find a sense of stability and safety (necessary ingredients for restfulness), an external world that doesn't value slowing down, FOMO, to name a few.

Today, I'm still in my bubble of no-time, still feverish, but instead of fighting I tried to roll with it. I still spent a lot of time in bed with a book, spent time in front of my laptop working on my novel, and now I'm sitting here writing this to you, but it feels a lot more restful, because how I'm doing these things has changed. I'm doing them less 'to get them done', and more 'because that's what I'd enjoy doing right now, in this time bubble I find myself in'. Doing a thing to enjoy it is different to doing a thing to tick it off a list and get onto the next thing. In no-time, the pressure to do all the things can leave, if I let it.

If I'm sick, my only real job is to stay hydrated and sleep, there's not all that much I can do to hasten health. But a change in how I am being might help. And I'm lucky that I can take a few days to let this no-time bubble do what it wants, not everyone gets to take time out when they're sick. 

I can't DO rest. But I can BE restful. If I absolutely have to DO, I can DO things in a restful way. This is probably blindingly obvious but it's also not something I've really thought about before - too caught up in doing all the other things. It's something I'm committed to practising, as the ability to rest is an important skill to have.

And I wonder if cultivating a default setting of restfulness might have the side effect of slowing time down (that said, I still want a time elf, so if you know of a time elf, or have any clues, please do let me know).