Restful activities?

Edit: Once again, the title has little to do with the post, and the subject shifts quite a bit. Oh well, thanks for reading :)


The plan here is to put a few legitimate thoughts down about rest. I feel like the "preliminary post" was disorganized and basically just said that I like to sleep (which is true). So, I guess this is it:

Rest can mean a few different things for different people. Even different things for the same person. I mean, most of the time, when I say I need rest, I mean I need to sleep. Either I didn't sleep much the night before, or I've been up long enough that I need sleep again, so I rest. I can also rest by just stepping back from life and shutting out the world. Usually this takes the form of TV or video games. In doing this, I rest my mind from the stress and the busyness of the world. This tends to happen when (you guessed it) I've been stressed or busy. Rest can also be in the form of an activity. For me, I can rest by disc golfing or running (ok, not so much the running since a little over a year ago). For a prolonged rest period, people sometimes go on vacation (I feel like I haven't for a while. Just a thought).



Sleep is pretty basic. I mean, we all do it, some more than others. Some people need more sleep, other people just get less than they need. We go into comatose, hallucinate vividly, and wake up with no recollection (unfortunately, can't claim credit for this one, here's my source: http://xkcd.com/203/). Everybody does it, everybody needs to. I happen to be one of those people that needs a lot of sleep. I'm okay with that. I really don't have a whole lot to say about sleep.

Mindless entertainment? Not a huge fan, but I still rest this way. It's unfortunate how desperate we get sometimes when we're looking for something "to do" (except we really just don't want to do anything). Not to mention the whole part about the entertainment industry filling our heads with junk. We still rest like this though, even though it's not a requirement for living, like sleep (thank goodness). It really can be useful to just distract ourselves though, and take a break from stress (it only helps when done right though, otherwise you just have a lot to do in less time and you feel even worse).

For another category of rest, I cited disc golf and running as examples. Even though these are activities (therefore, they require action/being active), it is another way of dealing with stress and busyness. Sometimes activities seem like they can't be restful. For example, some of you might be thinking to yourself, 'Running? How the deuce is running restful??' By no means is running physically restful, I'd be a loony to say that, but it is mentally relaxing. For me, during a run, it's an entirely new thing to focus on, in the here and now, not worrying about what happened or what will happen (which I'm pretty good about anyways). I suppose you could even argue that running causes physical rest because of endorphins and being fit and all that, but I would argue that that is still primarily mental rest.

Vacations? Sometimes they end up making you even more stressed than when you started. What's the worth in that, eh? Nah, they're worth it. You can have great vacations (I've had many) as long as you're open to plans changing. Basically, you need to have a good attitude.

Now, why am I going over all this? Honestly? I have no idea. I mostly just wanted to make a "real post" on rest. But something worth noting is that we can also become spiritually exhausted, which then causes us to need spiritual rest along with our physical and emotional rest. It's actually kind of ironic that spiritual rest involves "work": going into scripture and coming closer to Christ. That is how we rest.

I don't know. That's just some thinking that I had. Just putting it out there for y'all to read.
What do you think? How do you like to rest?