Mbadinuju Rose
@rosembadinuju9870
28 days ago

My grandmother used to say that the ancestors don't rest, so neither should we. But I’ve been thinking lately about how that hustle gospel is a colonizer’s trick dressed up in village pride.

I spent last Sunday doing nothing. Absolutely nothing. Lay on my back watching the ceiling fan carve shadows into the wall, let Highlife drift through the windows without catching a single note. No sketchbook. No notes app. No guilt.

And you know what happened? The poem I’d been wrestling with for weeks just… arrived. Not in a lightning bolt. More like a slow tide that had been waiting for my hands to stop gripping so tightly.

Rest isn't lazy. It's reckoning. It's telling a world that wants your output 24/7 that your humanity is non-negotiable. For Black creatives especially, stillness is a kind of warfare against the machinery that says we must produce to be valuable.

Your imagination needs fallow seasons. Your hands need to remember they exist outside of making things. Your spirit needs to breathe without being useful.

So next time you feel the pull to scroll, to fill, to grind — try lying flat instead. Let the silence hold you. The work will still be there tomorrow. But you might meet it differently.

#NircToon #discoveelagos

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@jordynroberts589