The Merriam-Webster Dictionary defines restlessness as, “lacking or denying rest: uneasy. Continuously moving: unquiet.”
Most of my life I’ve been a restless sort of person. There are lots of different ways to understand restlessness (many of which we’ll be exploring at our upcoming retreat, details here if you are interested) but when I think of my experience of restlessness, I think of it as a disquiet, an unease beneath the surface of things, a tension in my body, and a tendency to dream or focus on what’s coming next instead of what is present.
The first year that I lived at the retreat, I came face to face with my restlessness. I had just moved from the city to the wilderness. The closest amenities were a 30 minute drive. I moved away from my community, access to tv, internet, and quick jaunts to the grocery store. My restlessness and anxiety quickly spiraled. I worried that I was moving into obscurity, that I would lose all of my friendships, and that something (generally, a bear or cougar) would eat me. I worried that I would die there without amounting to anything. (I have a tendency to be dramatic.) I had lots of time to worry. Without tv, internet access, or frequent meetups with friends, I suddenly had a lot of time on my hands.
Living at a retreat centre normalized restlessness for me by providing the space and opportunity to reflect on my anxious thoughts and notice my emotions. Instead of bypassing or distracting myself, it gave me the gift of slowing down. In slowing down, I paid attention to my fears and anxieties; and I began to do the work of healing them. I realized my fear of obscurity was really a fear of not mattering, and I recognized that I had been indoctrinated into a belief that I only mattered when I was frantically “doing” and attempting to be productive. Slowing down allowed me to see what was present within me and also what was present outside of me.
As I started to notice and attend to my own feelings and fears, I also felt an invitation to look outside of myself to see what was there. I saw aspen, spruce, and pine. I saw chickadee, junco, and for one whole season I watched a stellar jay who somehow wintered way outside of his normal range at our feeder. I befriended a fox who lived just down the road and frequently joined me on my morning runs. In coming into relationship with the world around me, I became more familiar with my own restlessness. I came to realize that I only saw myself as having worth when I was productive, but I intrinsically understood that creatures around me had worth because they existed.
In noticing this dissonance in my beliefs, I began the work to reclaim my right to existence and to worth. I learned to see restlessness as an indicator that I’m being invited to consider what is happening on a deeper level within me and to notice what exists outside of me in the present moment. This has fundamentally changed my relationship to myself and to my restlessness. It has normalized it. By replacing my anxiety with curiousity, I began to realize that restlessness is a very normal human feeling that invites us to ask: What is my disquiet telling me about my current experience? What is present in the here and now that I might be missing because of it?
If restlessness is something that you are currently feeling, I want to invite you into these questions as well as to our upcoming retreat on February 24 & 25, where we’ll be exploring what the more than human world has to teach us about restlessness.