“I need some rest and relaxation.”
“I’ll rest when I’m dead.”
“Rest in peace.”
When we use the word ‘rest’ in the modern day, its meaning functions as a kind of macro-level period: rest comes at the ends of things. We rest at the end of a long day, after the semester is over, once we complete the sprint (metaphorical) at work, or the sprint (literal) on the track. In this sense, there is a presupposition of rest as the unfortunate but necessary break between the meat of life. The gods could go without a break, but because we are human, and therefore finite, we must occasionally stop to rest.
However, when you stop to survey what we consider rest, two things become evident. First, the activities that we list as rest tend to be activities we associate with pleasure, and second, the list is broad and on first glance appears to contain contradictory activities. Sleep and silence and mugs of tea before the fire are rest, but so too is watching TV, gardening, dinner with friends. If one were to point out a selection of activities we could comfortably define as a form of rest to an alien and ask them to define the common denominator, it’s difficult to imagine what they would articulate as the thread.
What a particularly astute alien might notice is a common absence: all of these activities are absent of the structured rush of a goal. They do not aim for something (other than the nebulous end state of ‘feeling rested’). Instead, they are self-sufficient acts, of value not because of what they produce or work towards, but because of the act itself.
This is perhaps simply the other side of the same coin. If rest is pause—or perhaps, in a linguistic sense, not so much the period as a subordinate clause, a tangent, a beautiful thought in parallel–then you can understand rest in both ways at once. When focused on destination or goals, rest is the pitstop along the way, and consequently the supportive actor (by nature) to the main role. But when we look at rest as a self sufficient act, we see it as a kind of animation of spirit, an affirmation that as humans we are not here merely to go through machinations but to enjoy ourselves while doing it, to revel, to reflect, to connect.
Fittingly, both these interpretations can be teased out of the roots of the word. Rest comes from the Old English Raeste, which means “rest; a bed or couch; intermission of labor; mental peace; state of quiet or repose” which is derived from the Proto-Germanic *rasto “resting place, burial place.” At this point the etymology breaks down, and there are a number of hypotheses. The one I am most interested in is the belief that *Rasto is related to the Old High German Rasta “league of miles”, the Old Norse Rost “league, distance after one rests,” and the Gothic Rasta, “mile, stage of a journey.”
Let’s assume that etymological linkage is correct, and mull on what those roots could illuminate about the way we conceptualise the word now. If we work our way through the definitions, we can almost reverse engineer the spectrum of conceptualising rest from extreme to extreme: