All my friends, my family, my colleagues and my knowledge shared a common desire for the last Easter holidays: rest. We all reached our vacation days with a radical need for rest, but when the holiday break was over, we want to relax from the weariness of the holidays. For the vast majority, Life has become an exhausting exercise. The fact that this week I want to write on rest is, in reality, a way for me to also demand rest in this column. Stop thinking about what’s going on in the world and that I could formulate a more or less interesting or appropriate opinion. Thinking of the world also means resting, looking at it slowly, being speechless, saying nothing. And here I am, silent, relaxed, and with a question to think together: Why are so many people so deeply tired?
I think this is the pressure we have exerted on each of our actions that tires us so much. There is a Level of demand on the mental environment of our time that is impossible to maintain. The variety of tasks we face is always growing, and they are all just as important. It is just as important to take children to school (and to do it well, with love, with joy, with a positive education), the holiday plan (book early and at a lower cost, find the best rated restaurants, buy tickets, take good photos), ace meeting with your boss, exam or training, think about your sexual health, or organize a buzzing date. And this mental request is exhausting, I would say unbearable. It is as if we had lost the hierarchy of actions and objectives and, in the process, which was formerly called the priorities of life. Now the existential priority is everything. It is therefore not life that is tiring, but the way we live it.
And this level of demand sometimes becomes a burden on our heads, tons of obligations that cover us like a mass of paralyzing cement. Everything becomes laborious and demanding, and we lose, in the worst cases, this happy attitude which is essential to face life with a certain lightness and a certain joy. But how is lightness approaching with the weight of the cement with what life was covered? If you are going to eat, you must first prepare the food. If you are going to prepare the food, you must first buy it. If you are going to buy something, you must first have earned money. If you already have the money, you must have a profession for earning this money. Each human act is divided into unfinished worlds unfinished and inexhaustible, and we, who know it, we simply exhaust by thinking about the radical effort with which we want to undertake each of the tasks which, of course, consider transcendental one by one and each in itself, as much or more as its objective.
And what is the interest of the holidays? Rest, as we have already said. But, paradoxically, as soon as we approach rest as objective, we have transformed it into another chore and, without achieving it, we have transformed it into another inaccessible objective. In the current state of things, all we can do is wish it again on Monday. Perhaps, if we take our routine with the lightness it deserves, we will finally have a well-deserved vacation … of ourselves.
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