I'm Uncomfortable With Doing Nothing

when rest makes you feel guilty

Last week, I had a moment where everything was fine. The birds were singing, the sun was shining, and I had this unusual sense of calm, which I’m unfamiliar with, washing over me. But instead of just enjoying it, I noticed it. Like really noticed the change in atmosphere from the norm, and I kinda panicked, just a little.

It’s like how I imagine it would feel if you were walking a tightrope with no problem, enjoying the view, when suddenly, you looked down and realized that you were 100s of feet off the ground, standing on nothing but a rope, and so you freak out and fall to your death.

When that feeling hit me, I couldn’t help but look for something more familiar to hold onto. So, I thought about a difficult conversation from earlier in the day and started replaying it because I felt strangely unsafe just sitting in peace.

I found a problem in the way the person had spoken to me, and I locked in. Now I had something to work with, something to interpret, something to adjust, something to hold onto. And if I’m being honest, that felt better than peace, and by better, I mean more familiar.

Maybe I don’t so much struggle with anxiety as I do with peace. Maybe I’ve gotten it all wrong all this time. It might just be that I, through years of practice, find anxiety more ordinary and therefore more a part of me.

See, I’m uncomfortable with not doing stuff. I like getting things done. I like being busy and making progress, and peace doesn’t give me anything to do. There is no checklist for peace, no to-do list, and that feels like underachievement.

For a high-functioning person like me, underachievement is the kiss of death. I’m just realizing this in real time, so forgive me if I’m beside myself right now. I mean, talk about barking up the wrong tree for most of my life.

My current research has taught me that our brains are trained by repetition, not intention, desire, or even awareness. Which means that your nervous system organizes itself around what’s familiar, and what’s familiar is whatever you repeatedly do or think, not whatever you know is true.

So that means that if you’ve spent years, as I have, replaying conversations, scanning for threats, and looking to people for cues to your safety, then when peace comes along, it feels like a frustrated spouse telling you to just calm down, and we all know how well that works out.

So, now I’m starting to wonder if anxiety isn’t interrupting my peace, but peace is interrupting my anxiety. (Bolded that so you’d read it twice.)

Peace interrupts my progress in the area of control, management, and work. If I’m at peace, then my usual job is no longer getting done. My work of interpreter, problem-solver, emotional regulator, and anticipator of everyone’s needs is suddenly neglected, and that makes me feel unproductive and reckless. So my brain gets me back to work because not being productive feels like vulnerability to a brain I’ve trained to thrive on vigilance and hard work, and being reckless is just plain crazy.

Because peace messes with my system, I run away from it in order to regain control and get the system back up and working.

Not being busy seems like a dare to me; a dare to figure out what I should be doing, and what I need to do next. And once I know that, peace isn’t relief, it’s neglect, cuz I got things to do.

I can turn peace into anxiety in a split second just by thinking about it. It’s like peace is a tightrope, and thinking is looking down. The moment I start asking why I feel this way, or whether I can afford to rest, I’m no longer walking; I’m calculating, adjusting, and trying not to worry about it, and by then, I’ve already lost it and plummeted into the depths of anxiety.

We say we want peace, but we fight it because peace is a whistle-blower. Blowing its whistle on the unpaid emotional labor of doing things that aren’t ours to do.

When I am at peace, I am not:

• Trying to stay ahead of problems that haven’t happened

• Making sure no one is mad at me

• Replaying a conversation that happened a week ago

• Setting the conditions under which rest is permissible, or

• Solving the world’s problems

These are God-sized tasks, and they are massive, heavy, and structurally unsound for a human to carry. It feels like responsibility, but it’s functional atheism: acting like the world is gonna stop spinning if I stop worrying about it. I stay busy so I don’t have to face the terrifying reality that I’m not actually in control of much at all.

But peace isn’t a reward for getting your life, or anyone else’s together; it’s the physiological necessity of being alive. It’s watching the birds instead of scanning for a predator behind every bush.

We don’t need to learn how to do peace. We need to learn how to stop being afraid of what happens when we stop doing everything else. We need to learn how to breathe like we aren’t being hunted. Because the truth is, the lion isn’t there; it’s just our fear of the future aggressively roaring and stalking us whenever we stop running.

Peace can’t survive the inspection of a mind trained to manage stuff. So I can’t work to maintain or hold onto peace, but I can let it exist without assigning myself the job of keeping it, understanding it, or figuring out what to do in it, because that’s when I slip back into work mode.

There is a lot to unpack in that one statement, because the urge itself doesn’t feel like I’m disrupting peace; it feels like responsibility. I mean, I’m paying attention, and I’m no dummy, I know you’ve got to stay ahead of stuff, or something could go wrong.

My instinct is always to assign meaning, to figure out what this strange feeling is, how long it will last, what I’m supposed to do inside of it, etc. I guess you could say my instinct is to turn peace into a project. And the moment I do that, I’m back to work and no longer living in peace.

Peace feels unsafe for the same reason grace does. It removes my job. And if you’ve spent your life managing what was never yours to carry, then the absence of responsibility doesn’t feel like relief. It feels like failure. Ah, peace, when did you become failure?

Here’s what I’m saying, peace would be more peaceful if I didn’t feel guilty for experiencing it. Which is ironic, considering how much I’ve studied and written about it. Turns out, knowing what peace is and letting myself live in it are not the same thing. (But this is something I’ve been coming back to when I can’t seem to stay there.)

I think I need to go reread my book on the fruit of the Spirit. Join me?