The Layers of Unrest
The ways we don’t tend to ourselves compound like layers of rock sediment: hardening and separating us from our core (humanness) and each other.
A lot of us are feeling the world in peak unrest as pandemic-pressured life continues to charge our decisions and perspectives while human rights unrest is visible throughout the globe. With so much shifting and toppling, I hope we can be resourced by the choices we can control and be kind in the process as a place to begin to affect.
‘Of Time’, 35mm © Flory Huang, 2022.
Unrest is one of 2 multilayered elements that I invite you to tend to here in The Rested Revolution (the other being restlessness). While being rested does not mean anything close to any standard of “perfect” nor an absolute absence of unrest and restlessness that magically lasts forever, I do believe there is a quality to our being with which we can show up as a radically transformative response and in our individual contributions that accumulate into community care. This includes the real truthful, and seldomly aesthetic/activity-dependent, kind of self love and self-care. It is a courageous and trusting act of embodying.
When unrest and restlessness are not tended to, it feeds into cycles of hurt and harm. Conscious and intended— or not. Our relationships with ourselves are not exempt from this and is an origin point. Internalized oppression is one of many shapes. Unrest can be as subtle as an intangible gnawing in the back of our minds, the subconscious current of energy not letting us be fully present, or a drive we egotistically veil as ambition in choosing to doing more because being distracted feels a whole lot better than being with discomfort. Other times, it’s where the cliché of hurting people hurting people plays out in reality. (Notice how simple it can sound: free people free people, healing people healing people, growing people growing people…) Unrest can take shape as an irritated and curt reaction that denies someone dignity and respect, or it’s a heavy burden of moving day after day with unrequited grief, shame, anger, sadness, pain, tinting the interactions we have, warping the lenses of which we look out at the world… the spectrum is as broad and nuanced as we are deep as people. Quieting our own mind to pay attention to our surroundings and we can see what an under rested world feels like. In the paradox that is what is beautiful and remarkable, quieting our own minds and paying attention to our surroundings is also one pathways to tasting what a rested world can mean and be.
In the past 2 years, I’ve noticed a mounting struggle and resistance to acknowledging unrest. Culturally for many of us, there’s a single dimensional aloofness that paints unrest as part of life’s hardships. From what I’ve experienced, this ambiguity and dismissal leads too quick to apathy and arrogance. Partly, there’s an ignorance because we’re not taught how to confront the intangible within. It’s difficult to identify something without any conceptualization or learned language. Partly, it can get heavy and heartbreaking to confront the multifaceted Shadow. Partly, (because you see, it’s lots of parts) because it’s difficult to acknowledge suffering and pain in any forms while our thinking brains are literally anatomically and neurophysiologically wired to avoid and prevent the friction, discomfort and pain. On another layer, personal unrest is also connected to the universal. As a collective conscience, we do feel everything and each other— the extents to which we acknowledge that is what varies person to person. It is our humanity. Maybe more so from a pragmatic place, it’s difficult to commit the time and energy to do such heavy lifting and deep examining when we are already tired of being tired. After all, our days are finite and priorities have their order. Yet the more we cultivate our ability to be with these truths and inconveniences, the more space we begin to identify for choosing to slow down or pause as a response. To exploring and investigating what is actual possible for ourselves. The layers of unrest are countless, yet so are the ways we can sift and tend to them. The rest is up to you.
I hope these observations can further support us in naming unrest when it is present, the intention of informing and leading us towards responses instead of reactions. To move through the world with more intention, compassion and grace. Starting with ourselves counts.
Perhaps it resonates to explicitly mark these as portals we can step through towards tending. We must both know and understand. It’s literally life-changing. To note, our unrest is as humxn as we are. Let this not be something to fear but to more graciously embrace with tenderness and time. Unrest is multidimensional and connected: felt, seen, heard, tasted, thought, touched. With acknowledgement for the limitation of language, layers of unrest (in no particular order or exhaustive) present in your life may be:
• emotional unrest
• spiritual unrest
• intellectual unrest
• physical unrest
• sub/unconscious unrest
• civil unrest, social unrest
• labor unrest
• cultural unrest
• racial unrest
Unrest illuminates points of friction that upon closer examination, with compassionate inquiry for the sake of loving care, are actually maybe less of sharp edges to avoid and run from, but slivers of pathways and portals towards what matters to us most. It seems akin to the ways my anger would inform of me a situation where my values are incongruent, challenged, threatened. If we can learn to allow our feelings to be information in a given circumstance, I believe we can also learn to actively tend to the layers of unrest that exist in our lives. And with respect to their complexity, to their relation to aspects of life that may be out of our control whether societal systems or ungovernable forces of nature, perhaps we can move with and through the layers of unrest in a way that is restful. Then with the energy conserved, perhaps we are able to approach our lives with generative practices in patience, trust and receptivity.
Of the unrest you relate to, reflect on why it is currently present for you. Notice what aspects of your identity, life and worldview(s) it impacts. Notice if there are forms of unrest you don’t relate to: why or why not?
How do you feel when you engage with unrest?
Are there sensations or feelings that come up with the thoughts that form in your mind in reaction? In response?
What other shapes or shades of unrest are being revealed to you now?
There’s more to share and will be here soon. Make sure you’re signed up for The Rally email community to be notified when this article’s second part is available online. I welcome you to share this article with a loved one or peer to facilitate dialogue.
I’m here to discuss or support you further: let me know where these portals lead you. Until then, rest well.
