I just had a baby.

The birth of our newest boy, Asher Ruben, coincided with the rest week I carved out for my creative world back at the beginning of the year, so for the week he was born, I stared into the eyes of a newborn instead of the lines of a to-do list.

It was divine. If anyone’s ever spent time with a newborn, they know how precious (and short) that time is.

Back at the beginning of the year, I set aside as rest weeks every seventh week, matching up with my two school-age boys’ school vacations, marking those days as a time when I would intentionally rest—read more than I normally do, learn something new or just hang out with all my boys.

Here’s what my first rest week looked like:
I slept more.
I researched places to submit my writing (that would actually pay).
I played with my children—put together puzzles, played board games, read more stories.
I learned how to blog a book.
I wrote a song, which I don’t schedule in my normal work day anymore (and probably should, because I miss it).
I welcomed a new baby into the world.
I held the new baby all hours of the day (still am).
I became completely captivated (again) with a tiny human and his little precious face and tiny hands and the sweet curve of his nose.

It was pretty productive for a week of rest, I think.

As creative, we need these regular intentional rests—time to do something out of the ordinary, time with our families we wouldn’t normally get during the working hours of a week, time to learn something new.

We create in truer ways when we are living, but sometimes we get so caught up in the creating part that we can forget the living part. There are all these projects we want to do and all this creating we need to do and so little time to do it all, and before we know it, we’re always working, always existing in that brainstorm world, always missing the incredible beauty that’s right in front of our faces.

A week of rest brings us back here, to reality, to existence, to presence.

We think that resting might derail our forward motion, send us backward instead, but we could not be more wrong. Resting intentionally from our work sends us forward faster, because we approach our work with new eyes and new ideas and whole new hearts.

Maybe it’s because my rest week ended with a precious newborn in my arms, but I can’t help noticing that I am more anchored to the present moment, that I can see more clearly into life’s beauty, that I can create better.

Lately I’ve been reading a collection of short essays by Sarah Ruhl, who is a screenwriter with three children. One of the first essays in her book, 100 Essays I Don’t Have Time to Write, is on children and interruptions. In her conclusion she says, “I found that life intruding on writing was, in fact, life. And that, tempting as it may be for a writer who is also a parent, one must not think of life as an intrusion. At the end of the day, writing has very little to do with writing, and much to do with life. And life, by definition, is not an intrusion.”

I agree completely.

It’s in our living that we create our greatest masterpieces. That’s why rest weeks, spread throughout a year, can walk us right into greater depth and focus and art.

In our living, we create art. In our art-creating, we live.

What does your rest process look like? What have you learned about rest in your own life? What can you do to start making rest a normal part of your work?