Welcome to Edit Your Life, a podcast to help you edit the unnecessary from your life so you have more room to enjoy the awesome.

Through episodes with me, Christine Coe, and a range of smart, compassionate guests, you will come away with insights and tactics to help you find the agency and space to simplify

and declutter your home, time, mental space, and more. Hello, friends. In the first

episode of 2024, the episode is called Tips for Gentle Entry into the New Year, I opened by sharing

an essay I wrote on Substack called The Radical

Act of Rest. I will link both the episode and the substack essay in the show notes if you would

like to dig deeper into what that was all about and all the backstory. But in a nutshell,

this period of time spanned from December 15th to January 15th and was a month that I carved

out with great intention given the chaotic fourth quarter of 2003 that I was working.

I was so very ready for that period of time and it ended up being truly magical.

I have been thinking a lot about that month, and I wanted to share some lessons that I think

will be relevant to all of you, whether you have the potential for a half hour to rest or a longer

stretch like I was able to carve out.

And the thing is, the seven lessons I'm going to share are

all things that can be carried forward into regular life. I think the space of this period of time

helped me learn new things or see things that I believe to be true, but periodically

struggled to execute with deeper clarity. Let's jump right in. The first lesson is,

you deserve rest. Bottom line, end of story, no excuses. So after I posted my piece on the radical

act of rest, someone asked if I had read, Rest is Resistance by Tricia Hersey.

I had not.

I am currently reading it.

And one thing Hersey makes clear is that the whole narrative around needing to earn rest

...