a birthday of rest

I remember the last time my birthday fell on a Monday - December 28, 2015. I went into work like any other Monday, did nothing out of the ordinary, and listened to a lot of Courtney Barnett. It might have been nice to take a day off, but it was a fairly relaxed time of year; it almost seemed like a good idea to go into work and take care of a few things when I was less likely to be distracted. I also remember working on my birthday in 2018, which was a Friday. Again, nothing to report, except that it was among my better birthdays, or at least better celebrated, which might have had something to do with my colleagues, or that it was a Friday. Of course, being my birthday, it was also during the same time of the year as when it'd fallen on a Monday in 2015 - it was the slower period between Christmas and New Year, when being stuck at work is an opportunity to unstick some things that have been stuck at work.

This might be why I've never quite related to those who insist on taking a day off for their birthday - from my perspective, working on my birthday has never caused a problem for me, and sometimes it's even been productive. But this way of thinking has an unseen issue, which is that it treats rest as a secondary concern; my specific example about taking a birthday off reveals how I prioritized work considerations ahead of rest. I think this will soon change for me because I've learned something this year about rest, which is that rather than think of it as a value proposition - given everything else I do, how will I get the most out of my rest? - I should think of it as a primary objective - how can I get the best rest, even if it means forgetting about a few other things?

I think I have a lot left to understand about myself in this area - my revelation from earlier in the year that I respond better to four-day weekends than I do to entire weeks off has led me, literally, to where I am today (taking a day off on my birthday, creating a four-day weekend). The key, it seems, is that the casual clichés about rest - you should get a good night's rest, it's important to rest, and so on - are wrong in the way that they imply rest works in the same manner for everyone. The better approach is to think intentionally about resting properly, using insight and experience as a guide, because getting the most out of my rest means understanding what works best for me; there's no sense in resting on someone else's laurels, so to speak, when it comes to cultivating self-awareness about rest.