Don’t listen to Arnold Schwarzenegger – join the rest and relaxation resistance!
‘Rest is for babies and relaxation is for retired people,” barks Arnold Schwarzenegger in his new self-help book, Be Useful: Seven Tools for Life. I am definitely not the target audience for this tome: I get exhausted just trying to type his surname. It is interesting that Schwarzenegger is viewed as a relatively benign figure whose advice you might want to hear, despite the multiple allegations of sexual misconduct. At least he apologised for it and, unlike many Republican politicians, he doesn’t think the climate crisis is woke fiction, which is refreshing.
I think he’s got it very wrong with this rest thing, though. You would expect a man whose entire career was built on the burn to venerate sweating and grinding, but don’t even the biggest biceps and ropiest calves need the odd day off? The concept of rest is enjoying a low-key fight back, gently insisting that hustle culture hushes and has a little lie down with its snuggly blanket. I am seeing an encouraging amount of it: “Rest is productive” reads a widely shared post on my Instagram You’re Doing a Good Enough Job, joyfully makes the case for doing less and enjoying more.
Better still, an interviewee recently introduced me to the work of the utterly inspiring Tricia Hersey, self-proclaimed “Nap Bishop” and the author of Rest Is Resistance. Hersey has made it her life’s work to reclaim and advocate for rest as a radical act. It is a philosophy that emerged from her reading of slave testimony, and her growing realisation that pressure to work and strive to exhaustion was a tool that enables Black oppression. Still, she says her message is for everyone and I am grateful for it. “I judge success by how many naps I took in a week, and how many times I told somebody no; how many boundaries I upheld,” Hersey told the New York Times last year and that is now my mantra. Come on, Arnie: why not give the gym a miss for once?
• Emma Beddington is a Guardian columnist
2am because you can’t shake the jetlag. The waking nightmares that manifest themselves as tentacles rising from the water to pull you down to the unspeakable horrors below. You know, that sort of thing.
The music industry compounds that loneliness by drawing an invisible line between artist and public. The old “Elvis has left the building” shtick. In business, you might call it “the ethic of scarcity” coupled with “the ethic of exclusivity”. Comedy does away with that veil of pretence. Brainwashed by 10 years in music, I was always blown away to see a headline comedian standing at the bar post-show. The comedy biz is a box of broken toys, all jumbled together. The music industry likes to keep those broken toys apart, like grim museum artefacts on glass pedestals.
Look, but don’t touch.
If you write a hit song, you’re stuck playing that song until the day you die or retire (one and the same occasion for the truly greats). Comedy demands the opposite. You can’t dine off the same joke for your entire career – though many have tried. Comedy keeps you on your toes. It took me 10 years in music to learn that I am either too easily bored – or too emotionally spoiled – to sustain a career in anything other than shark fighting, bomb disposal, or standup comedy. I once literally fell asleep while performing my monthly residency at the local Las Iguanas. I’m not kidding. I woke up as the song that I WAS PLAYING ON THE PIANO came to an end.
Deep down, all rock stars want to be comedians and all comedians want to be rock stars. Musos covet the comic’s self-reliance; comedians covet the musician’s sex appeal, money, fanbase – the list goes on. I am so lucky and grateful that my tired little muse flew back to me after I became a comic. I am so proud of my dumb little songs about bread, Jesus and ejaculation, because they represent an atonement for my formerly swollen pop star ego.
It’s easier to say I gave up music, but what I really gave up was taking myself too seriously.
Jordan Gray is currently on tour with her multi-award-nominated show Is It A Bird?
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