The muscle grows during rest.
Some view rest as a luxury granted once the work is finished; treating it as a reward rather than a fundamental need. These are people who assume their constant state is production. The reason they are on this earth is to increase stakeholder value and rest occurs at the end of the financial year. They continue to test the muscle through days, weeks and even years.
The muscle is what we use to make this life smoother.
Most have partners that will tell you when you when to rest. Some wait for their boss to tell them they should take a break. Others are told by health professionals as a final warning instead of a helpful gesture. The unlucky few, who are also the ungrateful, neglect rest until burnout. Regardless of how, rest is often thrust upon us instead of chosen. It is not often I meet anyone who looks forward to the opportunity to do nothing. Just be.
I have never chosen rest, rather I wait for my muscles to give out.
I will fall asleep on a train on the way back home from work. Feel my eyelids become elephant tusks as I struggle to remember what movie I chose to watch. I take my first meaningless seat after a 10 hour day of being overstimulated and give into my muscles’ pleas for rest and am shocked by my body’s response. My legs shake, posture droops and brain excretes “That’s crazy” as a response to the most vanilla conversations. Good enough becomes to highest praise to any activity and coincidentally is where my effort stops. Putting my washing in a tumble dryer is an accomplishment that need to be rewarded with the Nobel Peace Prize.
The muscle reflects in transit.
In many ways, being in transit is our only dual experience of both physical and mental limbo. Unless you’ve acquired a pilot’s license and are in a dire situation, you cannot leave the airport once you’ve checked in. Physically, you’re stuck in transit until a pilot can courier you to your destination. Mentally, you aren’t allowed to rest. The loudspeaker overhead is giving detailed information about all 127 flights that are scheduled to leave in the next 30 minutes. A handful are delayed. A few have changed gates. Others are cancelled completely. You need to know the updates on your flight constantly and therefore must listen out for your flight number and/or destination; a needle in a haystack. Or else you will be trapped in limbo.
Comedically, purgatory is described as a waiting room. In the process of cleansing the soul, one must wait until the 'work' is complete. The concept of waiting as a transitional state is ingrained in us—a universal truth that applies whether we are waiting for judgement or just a connecting flight. The expectation is that once we have served our time, endured the necessary liminality, we will be allowed to move forward. Yet, some of us stay in transit.
Hong Kong is my transit city. I’ve never left the airport and have only stayed an accumulative 6 hours over 10 years here, 3 of which are on the tarmac. An airport that boasts a skyline of cranes and dump trucks in front of a cloudless sunset. Flights leaving in every direction at an unfathomable occurrence. Hong Kong’s muscle does not rest and therefore provides a liminal waiting room.
And in this waiting room I met Wen and a toddler, both restless.
Travelling with a toddler is heavy work, especially a blue sky thinking toddler. Not one of the regular follow-the-leader toddlers that are a dime-a-dozen on a flight. Wen stood exhausted in a cluster for the next flight. Clusters are often fronted by those who are impatient and would be keen to drive the plane if asked. Those of us at the back of the cluster have accepted that we are doomed to wait for the rest of our lives, and this is yet another scene of the play.
In airports, we either wait in clusters or lines. There is nothing outside of this binary. Both require an understanding of hierarchy and passive-aggressive body language.
Times it is acceptable to cluster:
waiting near the gate before your seat is called.
waiting near the gate when you believe your flight is delayed/cancelled.
unsure what you’re waiting for, but it’s important because others are waiting too.
Spaces you cannot cluster:
for the bathroom.
for food.
When they psychologically force you into a line using the built environment.
We are both disappointed by the news of the delay but accept our fate. I ask her where she’s going, to begin the conversation. She replies with a certainty in her voice, “home”, as if I should be aware to the location. I take her answer as a tired response; that maybe she doesn’t want to speak to a stranger right now. My smile is the response and I respectfully, shut the fuck up. Every person in this cluster is on their own path and it would be healthy to assume that more than half of these travelers are going home. Maybe all. Except me.
“Where are you going?”
Elation runs through my body that she’s asked, but I’ve got to play it cool. Gotcha.
Our conversation progresses and we become beams of energy for one another. It’s nearly 4pm in this country, so I had to assume she’s travelled far to be this tired during the daytime in Hong Kong. I don’t pry though, stepping on eggshells until I can ask her the question. She’s forthcoming with her age after I share mine; something refreshing that we never do in our culture. It’s often labelled as inappropriate, but to us, the sharing of information only makes this trip less lonely. So far, every piece of advice I’ve received about travelling overseas have been from men older than me. Advice that I’ve (respectfully) taken with a pillar of salt. I’ve seen them resort to the taxi rank after struggling with the Uber app on free Wi-Fi; I’m good. What could I learn from a woman travelling alone with a child whose sleepy sights are only set on home?
Figure out what you don’t like faster. Be honest with it. Be honest with you. You already know you just don’t believe yourself.
Speaking to Wen in a language that was not our first, in a country neither of us call home, was spiritual. Ships in the night is a term overused to explain a brief connection between two souls that are hopeful to prolong their encounter. A missed opportunity for longer moment; but a fleeting one that is so memorable. I use this term in the antonymic way; anything more than our conversation would have ruined it. She explained her answer to me, detailing everything she hated when she was younger. Spaces in her hometown, birthday parties, conversations with certain people; she had known since she was a child that she disliked these things. Instead of confronting it, she endured what would become an unhappy childhood.
This was our moment. These ships had drifted close in the night, rudderless.
My mother told me hate was a strong word and I should refrain from using it on things like vegetables. I grew to never use it at all; to never recognise it. Disliking anything caused me to look inward instead of believing it. There must be something wrong with me if I’m uncomfortable here, but all 7 of my friends are fine.
Personally, at 27, I feel like I constantly focus on things that I don’t like. I refrain from talking about them to feel like I’m fun at dinner parties. Have I ever been honest with the things that I don’t like, just to be likeable? How much of my happiness have I sacrificed just to be a vibe? How much time have I wasted with people I dislike, because the truth will hurt them?
That spiral was where the second part of her quote hit.
Be honest with you. You already know you just don’t believe yourself.
My first moment in therapy was confronting that I had no idea how to express hatred or anger; I would let it eat me up inside and turn into anxiety. There were things in my life that I disliked, but I was too interested in keeping the peace instead of being honest with anyone else; being honest with myself. Brandon, my therapist, told me that I knew all the answers when I asked him, “Why?”. He was right. I would argue with my mind as if my body knew psychology. Drinking a few glasses of wine before I spent two hours with a friend. Flaking at the last minute. Pulling a sickie. Standing in a corner making a fool of myself at an event I didn’t even want to be at.
All those nights would have been much easier if I was honest with myself.
I was deep into these relationships and career paths that I was clearly not interested in. I searched deep and wide for the sunshine moments and positives about people my body was rejecting. Wen told me to find out what I don’t like faster; instead I have been searching for the bright side of everything.
While that optimistic endeavor will one day save the world, it has harbored me from true happiness.
The muscle of self-awareness grows when we rest from pretending. Every moment spent forcing myself into spaces I hated—into friendships, jobs, obligations that drained me—was a workout in endurance, not growth. I was strengthening the wrong muscle, the one that withstood discomfort instead of the one that let me walk away. But muscles only repair when they are given the space to rest. Just like overworked limbs shake under pressure, a mind that ignores its own dislikes will eventually give out. The tension between optimism and honesty nearly broke me, until I realized that both could coexist.
Finding out what I hated wasn’t an act of destruction; it was an act of rest.