The Doctor Told Me to Do Nothing, So I Booked the Hardest Nothing I Could Find

My doctor used a word I had never had applied to me before. Depleted. She said it kindly, the way you might tell someone their car has finally stopped because there was never any oil in it. She said I needed to rest, properly, for a stretch of time, and I laughed, because rest was the one skill I had spent fifteen years unlearning.

I run projects for a living. Or I did, at that intensity. I was the person who answered the email at eleven at night and again at five in the morning, the one who could not sit through a film without checking my phone twice, the one whose idea of a holiday was working from a nicer chair. My body, it turned out, had been keeping a ledger the whole time, and it had finally called in the debt.

Why I could not just lie on a couch

Here is my problem. If you tell me to rest at home, I will reorganise a cupboard. I will answer one small work message and then forty. Home is where my compulsions live. I knew that a week on my own couch would not heal anything, because I would spend it being busy about being restful.

So I did the strange thing. I decided that if I could not trust myself to do nothing, I would go somewhere that made doing nothing the only option. Somewhere with no signal, no cupboards, and nothing that could possibly be my responsibility.

A friend who had watched me run myself into the ground for years sat me down and said she knew exactly where I should go. She had done it herself after her own collapse. She described a Botswana safari where the days had no schedule she could control, where the only thing on the agenda was to sit in a vehicle and watch animals decide what they would do. She said the loss of control was the whole point, that it would drive me mad for two days and then set me free.

The first two days, exactly as promised

She was right about the two days. I arrived wound as tight as a spring. On the first morning I asked what time we would be back, and the guide, a calm man named Kabo, looked at me as if I had asked what colour the number seven was. Back for what, he said. There is nowhere you need to be.

I did not know what to do with that. My hands kept reaching for a phone that had no signal. I felt the physical discomfort of a person whose entire identity had been built on being needed, sitting in a landscape that did not need me at all.

The place I was staying was a small Botswana safari lodge on the edge of the delta, a scatter of tents on raised decks with the water moving quietly below. There were no locks that mattered and no clocks that mattered. On the second night I lay awake listening to hippos somewhere out in the dark, that huge wet grumbling sound, and I felt my heart doing something it had not done in years, which was slowing down.

The elephant that would not be hurried

On the third day everything changed, and it changed because of an elephant. We had been watching a small herd move across a floodplain, and one old female stopped, right in front of the vehicle, and simply stood. She was not doing anything. She flapped her ears. She moved a little dust with her foot. She stood there being an elephant for what must have been twenty minutes, and Kabo switched off the engine and we sat.

I felt the old panic rise. Twenty minutes, doing nothing, watching an animal stand still. And then, somewhere in the middle of it, the panic broke like a fever. I understood, in my body rather than my head, that the elephant was not wasting time. There is no such thing as wasting time to an elephant. There is only being where you are.

I cried a little, quietly, and Kabo pretended not to notice, which was the kindest thing he could have done. I had not cried in years. I had been too busy.

The second half, where I learned to be soft

The delta taught me to stop. But my friend had planned the trip in two halves, and she was wiser than me, because she knew that a lesson learned in one place needs a second place to practise it. The second half was the sea.

We flew out to the coast and I spent the back end of the trip at one of those Mozambique beach resorts where the day is shaped only by the tide and the heat. If Botswana taught me to sit still, the ocean taught me to go soft. I swam in water so warm it felt like the sea had been left out in the sun for me. I ate slowly. I read an entire book, which I had not done since university, cover to cover, in the shade of a palm, and when I finished it I sat and looked at the water for an hour and did not reach for anything.

There was a morning I walked the length of the beach at low tide, alone, and I realised I had gone a whole hour without a single thought about work. Not a suppressed thought. Simply an absence, a clean quiet space where the noise used to be. I stood in the shallows and let the small waves push at my ankles and I thought, so this is what other people have been doing all along.

What I brought home

I am back at work now, but I am not the person who left. I have rules I did not have before. The phone goes in a drawer at eight. I do not answer email in bed. When I feel the old panic that I am not doing enough, I think about the old elephant standing in the floodplain, unhurried, unbothered, entirely herself, and I let myself stand still for a moment too.

My doctor asked me, at the follow up, what had finally worked when nothing else had. I told her the truth. I told her I had to leave the country and lose the signal and sit in a vehicle with a man who thought clocks were funny, and then lie on a beach until my mind ran out of things to worry about. She wrote something down and smiled and said that sometimes the only way to learn rest is to be taken somewhere that does not offer you any other choice.

I keep a photograph of that elephant on my desk now. Not the beach, though the beach healed me too. The elephant. Because she is the one who first showed me that standing still is not the same as falling behind.