Get Radical. Get Some Rest.

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In ecological terms, 24-hour culture means more emissions and more consumption of the earth’s limited resources; we find ways to justify new runways, new wars, space tourism, and drilling for oil under melting arctic ice.

The solution, of course, is sleep (see “The No Wake Zone” on p. 68). When the emperor of Persia asked his Sufi master how best to renew his soul, he was told to sleep as much as possible because “The longer you sleep, the less you will oppress!” We sacrifice sleep for time, but that time becomes less fulfilling—and robs the earth of resources.

Another kind of tiredness is fatigue: a tiredness of activity. We live in a hyperactive culture where more is continually demanded of us. Unions have to fight to maintain vacation allowances and workday limits (see “Give Us a Break” on p. 65). Life proceeds at a pace that belongs not to the human scale, but to the industrial scale. Fossil fuels allow us to travel great distances at inhuman speeds without feeling tired. The tiredness we would have felt does not disappear, but is displaced onto the ecosystems that support our existence. It turns out that the toddler who observed the airplane “scratching the sky” was right.

I used to look askance at evangelical Christian athletes who would not compete on a Sunday. Now I think we should follow their example. We are tempted to avoid rest because we think we will produce more, but what we produce is less wonderful.

We should also consider ennui, which is tiredness of stasis. Ennui is all about that feeling of being stuck in a rut, of going nowhere. It is extraordinary that in our hyper­active society so many people are bored. Bored young people hang around the streets causing trouble. Bored soldiers commit acts of atrocity in military prisons. Workers are forced to choose between the boredom of the production line and the boredom of unemployment. Television, computer games, and prescription drugs temporarily screen us from the effects of boredom, but it comes back to haunt us in poor mental health, addiction, crime, and disease.

It seems logical that the antidote to ennui is activity. However, as we have seen, we are very active—even hyperactive. We need to replace activities that isolate mind from body with activities that involve the whole person in a valuable process. There are many sources of wisdom to help us here. Gandhi viewed work as sacred. Dutch historian Johan Huizinga showed how play is fundamental to human welfare, and the Kama Sutra explores the spiritual significance of sex. Martial arts generally developed as forms of meditation, ritualizing movement in order to replenish body and mind. In agriculture, one alternative to a static monoculture is crop rotation: Moving the crop replenishes the soil.

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