On the Difference Between Rest and Idleness

This is a harder position than it sounds, because the temptation to justify is enormous, and it comes from inside. You sit down to be idle and within minutes some voice begins constructing the alibi: this is good for me, this will make me more creative, this is restoring my focus for tomorrow. The voice is not malicious. It is the voice of a person raised to believe that time must answer for itself, and it cannot bear an hour that simply refuses to. To be truly idle, you must disappoint that voice. You must sit in the chair and decline, actively, to collect any benefit from sitting in the chair. The moment you catch yourself thinking the idleness is doing you good, you have lost it. It has become rest. It has rejoined the economy. The discipline of idleness, and it is a discipline, is the discipline of refusing every offered justification, including the ones you offer yourself.