The first empty moment arrives.
Almost without thinking, a hand reaches for the phone.
We call it switching off.
But our attention has not switched off. It has only gone somewhere else.
We need relief from work and the constant demand to remain useful. The problem begins when rest becomes another way of keeping ourselves occupied.
Distraction and rest are not quite the same.
Many Mediterranean forms of rest once placed the body within a shared world: the café table, the doorstep, the evening walk, the conversation that continued after the meal. These gave rest a social form. They have not disappeared but we can occupy them without inhabiting them, sitting beside one another while our attention is elsewhere.
Rest is not simply the absence of work. It is a different relationship with time: a moment in which nothing must immediately be produced, held, answered or consumed.
Perhaps we have not lost the time to rest. We have lost some of the forms that taught us how.
Photo: Ece Ebrar TOYCU / Pexels
