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You Need a Season of Rest and Celebration
Embracing the winter season of your creative life
One of the strangest compliments managers give is calling someone who produces a lot of work a “machine.” Why would any human being want to be a machine?
Machines work until they break — and then they’re replaced. But so many employers and hustle-and-grind-until-you-die influencers sell you on this idea that success only comes to those who outwork everyone else.
As a society, we put the most pressure to work like, and even look like, a machine on women.
From mothers being expected to work a full-time job to help make ends meet and to then work a second shift once they get home taking care of the children — and often their male partners — to our impossible beauty standards that treat any woman over 25 as an old hag, the message is clear: work until you break.
Olivia Rodrigo sums it up perfectly in her song “all-american bitch”:
And I am built like a mother and a total machine
One of the fundamentals of our humanity is the need for rest. As the code bros are fond of saying, this is a feature — not a bug.
Rest is when our body and mind heal from the rigors of life. It’s also when all the information we have taken in is synthesized. If you care about creativity, you need to have periods of idleness. You need to do what farmers used to do to their fields in the time before corporate agricultural conglomerates — you need to lie fallow.
We talk and act like human beings are separate from nature. But we are a part of nature, and as such, we are subject to the seasons, just like the birds, trees, and squirrels.
You need a season of rest, and because humans are a communal species, you also need a season of celebration.
We often treat winter like it is our enemy. In Shakespeare’s sonnets and plays, the winter of life is the time to prepare to die.
But winter is actually a time of healing and renewal.
