Read the full episode here https://journeyfrommeh.com/uncovering-meaning-stories-tell-ourselves/

Four-letter words don’t offend me. But the one four-letter word that I have battled with is: rest. 

When it comes to that four-letter word my natural inclination is to resist it with the ferocity of a toddler being told to take an afternoon nap.

What is it about this seemingly innocuous word that sets off the stubborn two-year-old in me?

I’m not sure if I’ve figured out all the answers to that question, but I’ve figured out some.

Last week our little pack of two humans and two doggos spent five days far from the crowds; maddening and otherwise. 

We discovered this wonderfully unpopulated 28 hectares of nature some years ago. It’s a rustic retreat where we start each day with a bit of mountaineering down to the clear river that borders the property. The four-legged pack members morph into mountain goats as they bounce from one boulder to another, tails in the air and noses to the ground - absorbing the criss-crossing stories of the veld.

The rocks eventually spill out onto river sand and, while we’re still navigating the last of the rocks, the only evidence that we have dogs are dusty mirages dancing above the path - followed by the sound trail and echo of a plop and a splash telling us they’re swimming in the river.

After a few minutes of them swimming in the natural pools we follow the path that meanders next to the river. They disappear into the surrounding bush proving that they take “bundu bashing” literally. 

Leading up to our time away my husband and I were aware of the mound of work we were leaving behind, so we started to plan what work we were going to take with us. Luckily we course-corrected two days before we left; deciding to rest and recuperate so that we could make a renewed, energised charge at the mountain of work when we got back.

We almost fell back into our old habits, but we were really grateful for the complete downtime.

For most of my life I’ve had the energy pattern of a toddler - manic activity followed by collapse. I used to say that I was only aware of my energy tank as “full” or “empty”, nothing in between.

Mid-life, burnout, and a bunch of life skills I was lacking, eventually led me to a point where I was evaluating my life and decided I needed to change the way I was living. I took a sabbatical to figure out how I was going to do things differently moving forward.

Part of that exploration and figuring out how to manage my energy tank led me back to the word rest.

I love words and I love fiction. Reading is more than escapism, it’s meeting new friends, travelling to the past, the future, different worlds. But the most powerful story that affects my life is the narrative running in my head.

The sabbatical kick-started an exploration of the stories I tell myself on a daily basis. 

Some of those myths and legends are so old that it helps to work with a narrative archaeologist - like a psychologist or life coach. Telling our stories, talking, in a therapeutic space is a powerful experience because it shifts the tales living in our subconscious to our conscious mind. 

And when that shift occurs, it brings the storyline to our awareness, where we can work with it, evaluate it, decipher its meaning and choose what the meaning of that scenario is going to be in our future. This allows for a shift in perspective to take place. Shifts allow us to move forward.