You Can Rest

It’s been a couple of weeks since moving from my little apartment to what my kids and I fondly call “the flat,” I’m exhausted. I feel like I could sleep for a hundred years.

But who will let the dog out or unpack the boxes still waiting downstairs or make sure M’s basketball uniform was clean for tomorrow and… who will write the post and pay the bills and settle this month’s accounting….

But try as I might, on this overcast Sunday, I can’t will my body to move. one. inch. Have you ever felt that? That strange temporary paralysis when your mind is awake but your body refuses to acknowledge it? It’s as if I’m frozen by a sleeping curse.

Perhaps it is my stubborn insistence to orchestrate this move like I was still 20-something and move everything except the big pieces myself. Or perhaps it’s the compounded 41 years of thinking that way… you know, I can do this — this life — all by myself! This morning, my body is not having it for one more second and I am trapped in my bed underneath an invisible hundred pound boulder.

My mind wandered to this painting, propped up in the windowsill of my studio, just just steps away from the bed, through the glass-paned doors. And my heart aches a little from its divine reassurance. It’s a sort of blasphemy to think that the world revolves around my ability to get things done. It’s an insidious lie that we’re alone in it.

You can rest.
It’s okay, every now and again, to put it all down.