I lifted my nose from the grindstone last Friday to rest – my first day of PTO since June. I dropped off my boys at daycare and made a beeline for the large park around the corner from their school – nowadays, nature is my drug of choice. For nearly two hours, I wandered through the wooded paths without a set direction or destination. After maybe 30 minutes, my mind, having shed the habitual focus on work tasks, upcoming deadlines and conundrums, joined my body and began to wander freely too. For the next 90 minutes, I rested. I mean, I hiked nearly five miles, but Oh! what a restorative feeling! In that time, I reflected on the role of rest in leadership.
As I eased into the reality of my respite – no Zoom calls, no emails, no talking points or key messages to draft – I connected to the Earth. She and I made music together, my heels tapping a steady beat on the dirt snare and my toes dragging a jazz brush across the cymbal of brown leaves on her surface. My body danced to the music in stride and thanked me with a gradual embrace of warmth against the near-freezing air. I shed my jacket after about two miles as blood coursed liberally to my muscles, a soft melody to the rhythm of my breath. My corporeal and spiritual beings were delighted to be used as intended – active, sensing, connecting.
At some point, I reflected, “what a privilege.” Then, before I’d completed the thought, I considered the sad reality that it is a privilege to rest, when it should be a right that each of us enjoys. Every living organism, including the earth itself, needs periods of rest. Consider how Earth relies on rest in her fields to revitalize the soil; how the waves of her seas crash upon the shores and then recede to repose in the bosom of the deep. Everything has its rhythm of work and rest. I sensed deep gratitude for my relationship with the trees at that moment. In my state of rest(oration), for the first time in a long time I felt situated in a more proximate stance toward them, rather than taking for granted the subtle exchange of my breath for theirs. My mind landed on something I’d heard before – that trees, rainforests in particular, are the planet’s lungs. In that moment, I thought – grimly, with a flash of Eric Garner in my mind – “she can’t breathe.” We – the collective We – can’t rest. We find Ourselves in a perpetual drive toward “development” – agricultural, real estate, industrial. Perhaps in Our frenzied state of unrest, we find Ourselves in a distant and extractive stance toward Earth, in this case her trees and forests. But our relationship remains inextricable. Like lovers in the same bed, one’s restless quest for comfort leaves the other weary and unrestored. Then Yasiin Bey’s premonition entered…
Every anywhere: heights, plains, peaks or valleys
Entrances, exits, vestibules and alleys
Winding roads that test the firm nerve
Fortune or fatal behind the blind curve
The engine oil purr, lights flash to a blur
Speed work through the Earth, make your motor go “Skrt!”…It don’t matter how your gates is latched
You ain’t safe from the danger, Jack
Yasiin Bey on “Rising Down” by The Roots
The artist eloquently acknowledges the complexity of our times (winding roads) and implores us to slow down before issuing a prescient warning that wealth and development won’t save any of us from the wrath of an earth so scorned. What is the role of rest and restoration in moving in right relationship with nature as We pursue the possibilities of tomorrow?
As I continued my hike, I contemplated sleep as one component of rest. For us humans, adults should get 7-9 hours of sleep per night on average. Sadly, for many adults (including myself), this recommendation is not being met. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC) 2020 Behavioral Risk Surveillance System survey indicates 35% of all adults average less than 7 hours per night. This lack of rest is not distributed evenly in the population, with 47% of Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islanders, 44% of African Americans, and 40% of multiracial adults reporting inadequate sleep duration compared with 31% of non-Hispanic Whites. Research also indicates that single parents, especially mothers, are more likely than their peers to have short sleep duration, frequently have trouble falling asleep and staying asleep, and frequently wake up feeling not well-rested. Research has established links between sleep and a number of health outcomes, including diabetes, cardiovascular disease, obesity, mood disorders, alcohol use and immune function. Dr. Dayna Johnson, a professor and researcher at Emory University, has produced a wealth of research exploring root causes of sleep disparities and their impact on chronic diseases. For example, her research has validated connections between discrimination and poor sleep quality among pregnant Black women and deeply explored the contribution of structural racism to sleep health disparities. I wondered about sleep disparities and structural contributions on my walk. Black Thought entered with crisp insight:
Ain’t a lotta sunshine when you on the frontline
Listenin’ to that ghetto drumline, duckin’ one-time
Thinkin’ how the Devil doesn’t tire, even sometimes
Wonderin’ how the fuck could one’s grind be this unkind…And to be honest, tomorrow is not promised
Black Thought on “Get Outlined“
Whether you on the streets of Chicago or Botswana
You gotta be rock solid, not to be outsmarted
To rise from rock-bottom to one of the top scholars
I never ask what’s the secret of success
With a target on your back and a scarlet on your chest
Listen, just get it, not a minute to rest
This is not a test, settle for the best, nothin’ less, dig it
He personifies, or rather deifies, structural racism in the first stanza, lamenting its relentlessness and giving a nod to a couple of its most prominent pillars – community violence and over-policing. (These, of course, are often accompanied by the wake and effective continuation of redlining; poor housing quality; employment discrimination; and more.) He then offers a poignant riff on a common mental model within Black American communities – you have to work twice as hard to get half as much. What is the role of rest and restoration in informing possibilities for realizing more just and equitable systems?
What does this all have to do with leadership, really? My mind went there as I continued my nature walk. I’m learning that an important task of leadership is to zoom out, observe patterns of experience, zoom back in to check assumptions about those patterns, and then create a space for others to work with those patterns. Restricting rest is a powerful form of oppression. Not only does it have negative effects on health, it also creates cycles that inhibit people’s ability to resist the sources of oppression. My work in rural communities across the U.S. has brought this form of oppression into sharp focus. Rural communities have historically faced underinvestment from public and private sources. This limits organizations’ ability to invest in operational infrastructure to sustain their own efforts and to coordinate with others. It promotes scarcity mindsets and competition when it comes to social enterprise, and it undermines the collaborative efforts required to address complex challenges faced by children and families. I’ve observed patterns of local leaders wearing “multiple hats,” working day jobs, running side businesses, serving on multiple volunteer committees, etc. For example, Mario, a man engaged with a leadership group in Mississippi, is Mayor of his town, bus driver, business owner and musician.
The history of slavery feels particularly salient in the present-day small towns of the Delta where Black leaders toil tirelessly against the inertia of structurally oppressive institutions, not to hand-harvest crops on exploitive plantations but to improve conditions of well-being for families in their communities. In candid conversations, these leaders acknowledge the fatigue and express the frustration of operating local school districts, organizations and agencies on shoe-string budgets. They explain the distrust that lives in their communities with regard to outside organizations because of the distant and more recent history of exploitive projects that at best leave little positive impact and at worst leave manifest harm in their wake. They share insight into the lived experiences of deeply devoted caregivers who miss opportunities to support their children’s well-being, not because they are neglectful but because they live each waking hour in survival mode. Upon this reflection, RZA faded into my mental soundtrack with this visceral lamentation…
What’s the science? Somebody? This is trick knowledge
RZA on “I Can’t Go To Sleep“
They try to keep us enslaved and still scrape for dollars
Walking through Park Hill, drunk as a fuck
Looking around like, “These Devils!”
I’m ready to break this world down
They got me trapped up in this metal gate, just stressed out with hate
And just give me no time to relax and use my mind to meditate
What should I do? Grab a blunt or a brew?
Grab a .22 and run out there and put this fucking violence in you?
These lines come after RZA painfully recounts the murders of five (and deportation of one) heroes in various fights for Black progress. Though tragic and violent, this example illustrates the ways in which systems of oppression might immobilize leaders by fomenting restlessness. RZA is rendered restless by the trauma of loss and chronic stress of oppressive living conditions. I’m seeing leaders and caregivers rendered restless also by the seemingly insurmountable daily challenges and chronic stress of functioning in systemically oppressive environments.
Dr. Shawn Ginwright, in his book The Four Pivots: Reimagining Justice, Reimagining Ourselves, offers some hopeful guidance for leaders encountering such challenges. His third proposed pivot – from problem solving to possibility creating – invites leaders into a space of dreaming (pun intended) what is possible. He suggests that the systemic pull to focus on problems hasn’t given leaders permission to dream about what they want to actually create, and it is eroding leaders’ capacity to imagine beyond oppression. Leaders are left in survival mode seeking always to lower amounts of suffering (e.g., ensuring the next paycheck covers basic needs; delivering a grant-funded program to the problem-focused specifications of the award), and this is not the same as pursuing what is possible. Ginwright offers the distinction between achieving violence reduction and realizing peace and offers a few tools and activities to try to make this pivot. I won’t attempt to describe them here. I encourage you to check out the book to learn more. His fourth pivot – from hustle to flow – invites leaders to resist the allure of the “grind” to realize a more healthy and sustainable approach to their work. He suggests that leaders often wrestle with an addiction to frenzy – perhaps fostered by oppressive elements of White supremacy and capitalism. For leaders of color in particular, the frenzy may be linked to the survival mode noted above and the mental model about working twice as hard. Ginwright also notes that it is linked with leaders’ own feelings of gratification and self-importance. These notions are often reinforced by organizations with which leaders work, encouraging “martyrs” for their respective missions. In this context, he notes that rest can become a very transactional way of recharging so one can come back to work and produce more, as opposed to a very human need to tend to one’s well-being that has value regardless of productivity.
I’ve returned to work since my hike, refreshed and recentered. I feel a particular commitment to supporting myself and other leaders with an enabling environment for rest and restoration as well as co-designing spaces for us to be in a place of possibility…while also acknowledging and working through the here and now problem solving that is necessary to meet the moment.
Hip Hop IllumiNation 