Student Blog: Do You Feel Guilty When You Rest?

Do you feel guilty when you rest?
Rush is the enemy of detail...

Hi! I am glad you opened this blog and if you are here reading this, is not a coincidence.

Have you ever felt guilty when you are doing nothing for 10 minutes or feel a rush in your gut when you finally get to rest?
Well, I want to share my own experience and some things that I made conscious recently.

If you have read my last couple blogs (If you didn't, I invite you to read them, they are pretty cool), I ran an online show and rehearsals were beautifully extensive, demanding, and exhausting. It was a process that I enjoyed at its fullest and my proudness is endless but in the other hand, my body and my mind were tired which is understandable.

After closing night, our little couple weeks break began, I was really excited because it was a much-needed rest. By surprise, I started filling my agenda with a million productive and artistic things to do, I set my alarm for 6am and I did this for the first week.

Recently, a little voice in my head said, "REALLY? my body needs rest." I sat down to meditate all of this and I am sure you can feel related because I discovered that I feel guilty when I have the opportunity to rest and I am not proud of that.

We are humans, we are not machines... This is applicable to everything, I feel that as an artist/creator it is so easy to feel with the rush of "What am I doing next? What should I create now? How can I be more productive?"

Reminding ourselves that RUSH IS THE ENEMY OF DETAIL is essential. If we don't pause to analyze and celebrate our victories and rest our minds and bodies we will be unbalanced and we won't be in a joyful journey.

We live in a society where we are educated that more is more and we have to be always productive and this is not human.

Specially us, as artists, we should pause often, and pay attention to what we really want and question ourselves.

Sometimes we might be in autopilot learning songs, monologues or doing whatever just to be productive and I think this takes the meaning of to our purpose

I invite you to be human, to rest, to leave a day off to reflect and get out of this autopilot. We deserve to rest, to give a taste to the feeling of accomplishment, there is no rush.

Thanks for reading me, have a beautiful rest of your day!

- Claudia Quintero, a Mexican and passionate girl.