The first week of September was supposed to be about my husband’s hip surgery. It was a big deal, but one we were ready for, something that was going to give him back a quality of life he’d been missing.
Then, two days before his surgery, what I thought was a pulled muscle turned out to be shingles. The very next day, our dog got sick and needed an emergency trip to the vet. Thankfully, it turned out to be just a tummy bug, and she’s back to herself now. My husband is also recovering well, though like me, he’s being reminded that rest is part of the process.
With shingles, I’ll have a good day where I feel like I’ve finally turned the corner. I get caught up in the “finally!” feeling and do too much and then I crash. While my husband was in recovery, a nurse told him, “You’re going to feel better before you’re really better.” His physio echoed the same thing: if you push too soon, you’ll only slow yourself down. Turns out, I needed that advice as much as he did.
The truth is, the hardest part hasn’t been the shingles or even the fatigue, it’s the constant pull of the “shoulds.” Sitting still while my mind runs through the list: you should be working out, you should be catching up on business, you should be tidying the house. None of that helps me heal. If anything, it just makes rest feel harder.
I was talking with a couple of girlfriends recently, one dealing with a cold, another with an injury and they said the same thing: their bodies were telling them to slow down, but it was hard not to keep pushing. Our conversations were a good reminder that our bodies are pretty amazing. They give us signals all the time to pause and heal. The challenge isn’t whether our bodies know what to do, it’s whether we’re willing to listen instead of pushing past those signals.
So here’s where I’ve landed: resilience isn’t always about doing more or forcing yourself forward. Sometimes it looks like stopping. Saying, “Not today. I need to rest.”
It doesn’t come naturally to me. I like to move, to do, to keep going. But maybe this season is the reminder I needed: rest isn’t wasted time. It’s part of the process. Sometimes the hardest work of all is giving yourself permission to slow down, so that when you are ready, you can come back with the energy to do all the things you love, and do them well.
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