When I think of The Rest, the first thought that comes to mind is “what remains,” “leftover,” as in “…and all the rest.” It was only today, as I talked to my doctor, that I realized the fallacy in my thinking. I was talking about how my energy shifted from last week’s hype-ness to this week’s lethargy. She replied that with all I’d been through lately, she wasn’t surprised that my body needed a lot of rest.

Rest for me has always come once everything was done, which meant that I often don’t get a lot of it. But of course the body is a bit more intelligent than the mind, and inevitably my body knocks me on my behind to the point where The Rest is no longer what remains or what is leftover after more important things are done, but primary, what gets done before all else. The Rest becomes as important as Doing, Thinking, and Planning, if not more so.

I’ve learned (or better yet, am *hopefully* learning) that The Rest does not take kindly to being an afterthought. The Rest for me is like gas in my car – it *can* run on fumes, but it’s not very happy doing so. It shakes a bit, sputters, and everything is just working so hard just to get up that hill that would be child’s play on a full tank. I know people who never let their tank get to less than a 1/4 full. They never run out of gas.

I’m trying to commit being done with relegating My Rest to The Rest, i.e. what’s leftover. Rather than taking The Rest only when I have nothing left, My Rest needs to come before the sputter, before the “doing too much” feeling creeps up, before the gas is gone. The thrill of seeing how low the tank can go, how long I can drive with the light on, how much further past ‘E’ the gauge can go, that thrill no longer excites me. I used to feel proud that my car could go another 70 miles once the light came on. No more.

I have to Rest what I’ve got before I don’t have it anymore.