Somewhere along the way, rest has become something we have to earn.
Gone are the days when stores closed at 5pm on weekdays and 1pm on Saturdays, when long weekends meant a break, not a full social calendar of hosting braais or a busy destination trip, when Sunday afternoons were for a well-earned nap and tea on the patio, and work waited until Monday because the office was, quite literally, closed.
Nowadays, we schedule it, justify it, and then feel faintly guilty about it once it’s done. Ask most people what they did over a long weekend and you’ll notice how quickly the answer turns into a checklist of activities: the hike completed, the market visited, the box ticked. Tell someone you did nothing, and you may well be greeted with total disbelief.
Doing nothing, it seems, needs a chaperone.
“It’s a shame that genuine rest needs an excuse,” says Onwaba Gonyora, Director of Brahman Hills, a five-star hospitality and wellness destination in the heart of the KwaZulu-Natal Midlands. “By rest, I don’t mean laziness or simply lying around. I mean choosing to slow down, be still and give yourself permission to properly switch off.”
The Italians have a phrase for it, dolce far niente, the “sweetness of doing nothing”. The Danes have hygge, a sense of comfort, contentment and ease found in simple, unhurried moments. Different cultures may describe it differently, but the idea is much the same: rest and leisure have value and are a worthwhile pursuit.
Modern life doesn’t make this…
CLICK HERE to read the FULL The Art of Doing Nothing article.
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