For years I told people that Ambien saved my life. I’m not sure I was exaggerating. I had spent a decade traveling, teaching, and giving my life away to a justice-driven calling I believed in — and somewhere in there my body stopped keeping up with my mind. A trip to Haiti in 2010 left me with an illness that went undiagnosed for ten years. The nights got unbearable. So I did what a lot of us do. I pushed through, and I reached for whatever would get me to morning.
Here’s what took me far too long to learn: giving your life away doesn’t mean ignoring the life you’re living.
Service disconnected from rest will eventually reduce to performance, not passion.
That’s the sentence that undid me. I had treated rest as the thing I’d get to once the important work was done. But rest isn’t the reward at the end of a meaningful life. It’s the ground underneath one. And I had built my whole house on a slab I never poured.
We made rest one more thing to be good at
Look at how we talk about sleep now. We optimize it. We track it. We wear it on our wrists as a score to beat. We chase rest the same anxious way we chase everything else — as an achievement to earn through effort. And so the one thing meant to release us becomes one more arena to strive in.
But rest can’t be seized. It can only be received. Sleep is the rare essential act you accomplish by stopping — by loosening your grip on the day and trusting that the world will keep turning without your supervision. That’s the hard part, isn’t it? Not the pillow or the room temperature. The trust.
What rest gives back
When we finally learn to receive it, rest returns more than energy. It reconnects us to happiness — because there is no delight in a life run at a sprint. It reconnects us to healing — because the body and the mind do their quiet repair in the dark, when we get out of the way. And it reconnects us to hope — because hope is a rested emotion. It is almost impossible to imagine a good future through the fog of exhaustion. Sometimes despair is just fatigue that has lasted too long.
None of this is a new productivity hack. It’s older than that. Every ancient tradition I know treats rest not as a luxury we earn but as a gift we’re given — a birthright we’ve somehow talked ourselves out of.
So here’s the question I keep coming back to, and I’ll leave it with you. When you finally can’t sleep — when it’s two in the morning and the mind won’t quiet — what are you actually longing for? And what would it take to stop chasing it, and start receiving it instead?
