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Health Check: What Does Rest Really Mean?

Magazines & Reviews

What does rest really mean?

2017/03/29 GMT

What Does Rest Really Mean?

BBC World Service - Health Check, What Does Rest Really Mean?

Doctors prescribe it for recovery – but for some “resting” might involve boxing or music

Doctors prescribe it for recovery – but for some “resting” might involve boxing or making music: Claudia Hammond looks to the arts regarding what rest is and what it’s for.

Most of us would like more rest – but what exactly is it?  Doctors tell us to put our feet up - but Claudia Hammond hears how a boxing poet and composer interpret rest. 

Over the past two years she’s been working at the Wellcome Collection in London as part of Hubbub – a group of artists, scientists and historians – examining the topic of rest. Hubbub’s leader, Professor Felicity Callard from Durham University, muses over rest’s relationship to activity.   

Some believe that life is a cycle between activity and passivity – rest always has to make you better at being active.

Dr Ayesha Nathoo from Exeter University studies how rest became a technical skill which needed to be taught in the early-twentieth century.  

Composer Antonia Barnett-McIntosh wrote a piece for flautist Ilze Iks called  “Breath” – an exploration of the musical term “rest”, when a musician pauses to inhale or exhale. 

Novels often use activity to drive plot: rest has been largely neglected except in rare examples like Bartleby the Scrivener who decides to make rest a way of life. 

Boxing poet Steve Fowler rests by sparring. He says his mind can’t rest until his body is tired out – and it makes him a nicer person. 

(Photo caption: A man sleeps in a hammock close to the beach in the commune of Anse-a-Pitres, Haiti  © HECTOR RETAMAL/AFP/Getty Images)

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