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RTÉ News
25-04-2025
- Health
- RTÉ News
Why rest is not doing nothing
Opinion: If rest enables vital functions for our mind and body, why do we not place greater value on it? "It occurs to me that I am resting. It is not the same as doing nothing. Resting like this is something active, chosen, alert, something rare and precious". So writes Katherine May in her book Enchantment. Composers, orators and athletes similarly appreciate the precious nature of rest. Zen Buddhist teacher Haemin Sunim observes that what makes music beautiful is the distance between one note and another, what makes speech eloquent is the appropriate pause between words. Elite athletes place as much emphasis on sleep, rest and recovery as they do on training. But does rest feature in daily life for everyone? The big four In 1922, Swiss born psychiatrist Adolph Meyer argued that rest should indeed feature. He spoke of how human life was organised around rhythms – "the larger rhythms of night and day, of sleep and waking hours, of hunger and its gratification, and finally the big four-work and play and rest and sleep, which our organism must be able to balance even under difficulty." Balancing needs and demands in this way is indeed difficult, for individuals and societies. Millions of people around the world are experiencing ill-health and disease that can be attributed, in part, to patterns of daily living and living conditions that do not support wellbeing. Non-infectious diseases like ischaemic heart disease, stroke, and diabetes are forecast to be the top three causes of disease burden worldwide in 2050. Mental disorders are amongst the leading causes of disease burden globally. A greater focus on rest in daily life may be one way to mitigate these risks. From RTÉ Radio 1's Drivetime, do our busy lives mean we overlook the recuperation benefits of just resting? The brain at rest Rest and sleep are often considered to be one and the same. However, they serve distinct purposes and accordingly both merit their respective place in daily life, as Meyer recognised. While the necessity for sufficient high-quality sleep is now generally well understood, although often still difficult to attain, the place of rest in the rounds of activity that make up our days has attracted less scholarly or popular attention, until more recently. Over the last 20 years, researchers have examined what happens in the brain during rest. In a resting state, awake but not engaging in any focused task or responding to external stimuli, the brain actively connects thoughts and experiences through its default mode network. At rest, when the mind wanders and daydreams, we reflect on our past and present, we think about our future. This regulates our mood and emotions and help us make sense of the story of our lives. If rest enables such vital functions, why do we not place greater value on it? Unrest Ironically, it is perhaps this fundamental feature of rest, this inward focus, sense making and reflection that deters us. When we stop and "do nothing", we think about ourselves and the world. Such thoughts can be overwhelming, not least when the world feels increasingly threatening and threatened. Unrest can feel like danger. Psychologist Sandra Parker writes that we are wired to remove ourselves from the discomfort of unrest, perceived as dangerous, with modern life providing innumerable exit routes, diversions and distractions. Making space for rest then means making peace with unrest. When we rest, we can notice sensations in the body, learn to distinguish danger from discomfort and soothe our nervous system. From RTÉ Radio 1's Reignite, What's the best way to spend your time given we only have 4,000 weeks on Earth? Writer Oliver Burkeman has some pointers. Too busy to rest Rest may also induce feelings of stress and guilt as Claudia Hammond found in the BBC Radio 4/BBC World Service The Rest Test, the world's largest ever study on rest, involving more than 18,000 people from 193 countries. Many people feel too busy, that there are simply not enough hours to meet the essential demands of the day, let alone make time for rest. 'To do' lists rarely get done. In part, this is because the possibilities for how we fill our time are boundless and increasingly boundary less. Remember when correspondence from the world beyond the office arrived once per day in the mail? Remember waiting to watch a favourite TV show when it aired once a week….and having to wait a further week to watch the next episode? Television channels stopped broadcasting as night fell. Businesses closed for lunch. Shops closed on Sundays. Nowadays, such external boundaries are fluid or largely absent, instead we must self-impose our own limits. Rest is radical Maintaining limits in this way may mean saying no to opportunities, no to requests, no to being 'always on'. It might mean letting go of attaching self-worth to busyness, productivity and self-optimisation, experimenting instead with saying 'I have enough', 'I do enough', 'I am good enough'. Letting go in this way is not a moral failing, observes Madeleine Dore, and may in fact be an invitation to others to stop too. Katherine May recognises that "doing those deeply unfashionable things - slowing down, letting your spare time expand, getting enough sleep, resting - are radical acts these days, but they are essential." Poet David Whyte depicts the potential outcome of such radical acts. "Rested, we are ready for the world but not held hostage by it; rested we care again for the right things and the right people in the right way". If this is deemed unfashionable, it's time to start a new trend.
BBC News
29-01-2025
- Entertainment
- BBC News
Six Nordic paintings that can help us rethink winter
Winter isn't all bad – these "sublime" landscapes of the frozen North from the turn of the 20th Century offer us a way into resilience – and an "acceptance of the seasonality of life". With its bare trees, long nights and icy temperatures, it's perhaps unsurprising that, culturally in the Northern Hemisphere, we seem so conditioned to complain about winter. Yet, as the author Katherine May points out in her 2020 book Wintering, winter is also a valuable time for rest and retreat. "Winter offers us liminal spaces to inhabit," she writes. Its "starkness", she argues, re-sensitises us, and "can reveal colours that we would otherwise miss". For Nordic countries, where, in some regions, the season can last more than six months, making peace with winter is a necessity, with concepts such as the Norwegian friluftsliv (embracing the natural world) and the Danish hygge (hunkering down with simple comforts) offering fresh perspectives on cold weather. At the turn of the 20th Century, the frozen North – with its vast fjords, mystical boreal forests and radiant light – became a powerful muse for artists such as Hilma af Klint, Edvard Munch and Harald Sohlberg. These artists immersed themselves in these cold climates, and developed a specifically Nordic style of painting imbued with their emotional responses to the landscape. Around 70 of these intensely atmospheric, expressionist works by artists from Scandinavia, Finland and Canada are being showcased in a new exhibition, Northern Lights, a cross-Atlantic collaboration that debuts at the Fondation Beyeler in Basel, Switzerland, before travelling to New York's Buffalo AKG Art Museum in August. It was natural that these painters should be drawn to these wintery scenes, Ulf Küster, the exhibition's curator, tells the BBC. "In Nordic landscapes, snow is a very dominant factor of life from October to late April… It's just this massive presence of white and nature and wilderness and vastness that really defines this landscape, and I think these painters have found a very interesting response to that." This burst of Nordic landscape painting was also a response to the changes that the painters perceived as a result of population growth and industrialisation. "There was a big desire in the late 19th Century to return to pure nature and the simple life," explains Küster. "You had these highly industrialised countries and pollution, and the pureness of white snow must have been quite a contrast." Many of these northern regions were comparatively untouched by change, and featured vast, unpopulated vistas that were inherently painterly. Even today, Norway has a population of just 5.5 million, but a length of around 1,600km; while around three-quarters of Finland is still forested. To convey this scale, these paintings often adopt unconventional compositions where the view appears to stretch beyond the canvas. They are "boundless", says Küster. "They don't have borders". This is reinforced by the bird's-eye view adopted in works such as View from Pyynikki Ridge (1900) by the Finnish artist Helmi Biese. "It's as if the artists have used a drone," remarks Küster. The height and scope of these unpopulated views also convey a sense of isolation and loneliness. Harald Sohlberg, whose luminescent 1914 version of Winter Night in the Mountains is widely considered to be the national painting of Norway, wrote: "The longer I stood gazing at the scene, the more I seemed to feel what a solitary and pitiful atom I was in an endless universe… It was as if I had suddenly awakened in a new, unimagined and inexplicable world… Above the white contours of a northern winter stretched the endless vault of heaven, twinkling with myriads of stars. It was like a service in some vast cathedral." It was this search for solitude that doubtless drew the Swedish artist Anna Boberg to the Norwegian archipelago of Lofoten, a remote location steeped in Viking folklore and, according to her 1901 memoir, "the apotheosis of Arctic beauty and wilderness". It was here, dressed head-to-toe in seal and reindeer fur, that she produced her Northern Lights (1901) painting, most likely sketched en plein air. In a commanding scene that speaks to the Romantic notion of "the sublime", prismatic streaks of light descend from the heavens dwarfing the snowy landscape. Boberg's awe when confronted with this dazzling wintry world with its unique light is clear. "What really drove these people was to find a response to the extremities of nature – the very essence of snow, winter and ice." explains Küster. To achieve this, they would "get as close to nature as possible", he says. Far from hiding from the harsh winter, Boberg and her contemporaries immersed themselves in the landscape. "They are painters who really wanted to paint the experience, to feel the extreme temperature and the snow blindness," says Küster. Munch, he continues, had outdoor studios, and would leave his paintings outside "just to let nature test them", while some of the Canadian painters would paddle out on to lakes and paint from their canoes. Beautiful and barbaric Inland, the boreal forest embodied the enchanting duality of these landscapes, which were both beautiful and barbaric. The dark, primeval forests became an emblem of foreboding in Nordic folklore and myth – places where you could get lost, and that concealed unknown dangers. The Nordic winter landscape fed the fairytales of the Danish author Hans Christian Andersen. "Below them the wind blew cold, wolves howled, and black crows screamed as they skimmed across the glittering snow," he writes in The Snow Queen (1844). "But up above, the moon shone bright and large." This storybook quality can be seen in Winter Moonlight (1895) by the Swedish painter Gustaf Fjaestad. Here, his clever use of pointillism makes the snow appear to glitter, while the hand-like branches of the dense, drooping trees look poised to come alive. In The Lair of the Lynx (1908), Akseli Gallen-Kallela, a Finn, also revels in this tantalising, darker side to the landscape, inviting us to scan the canvas for the dark places beasts may be lurking, and to follow their tracks in the snow. More like this:• Eight nature books to change your life• The climate warnings in 19th-Century paintings• How to transform your home with art Notable, also, is the power and movement he gives to the snow as it winds in thick layers around the trees. "The brushwork of this painting meticulously reacts to the layers of snow," says Küster. "It's snowing, then it's freezing, there might be some sun and there's a little thaw, and then there's freezing again and more snow comes on top." The painter is clearly entranced by the snow, the layers of paint telling the snow's story. The visual effect, observes Küster, is "like a sort of wedding cake". As well as drawing inspiration from the landscape's mythical associations, these artists participated in their own myth-making, expressing – through their own strong emotional responses to these unspoilt regions – an often idealised view of the Nordic winter. Some, such as Edvard Munch, nevertheless hinted at the changes threatening these serene expanses. During the winter of 1900, he stayed in Nordstrand on the banks of the Oslofjord. Here he painted his now-famous rendition of its serene waters reflecting a magnificent sky of pink, blue and yellow. But this picturesque, swirling scene, foregrounded by pines, is interrupted by a bulbous trail of white paint, denoting, not snow this time, but, as the title makes clear, Train Smoke. "When we look back at the landscape works of Gallen-Kallela and Biese, we are reminded of how much of the environment has changed in the intervening century," writes Anna-Maria Pennonen in her essay Changing Landscapes in the exhibition catalogue. "The Baltic Sea no longer freezes every winter, and the period when the ground is covered with snow in Helsinki can be very short, perhaps only a few weeks instead of months." As for the magnificent boreal forest, it continues to be threatened by logging and agriculture. Recognising the mutability of these environments now adds a powerful new dimension when a modern audience engages with these 100-year-old works. "They ask us to think about the enchanting image of the forest in relation to its past and current transformation, as well as in relation to our own part therein," writes Helga Christoffersen in the catalogue. The works invite feelings of nostalgia and melancholy, and our appreciation that they are endangered only amplifies their beauty and psychological intensity. Danish artist Jakob Kudsk Steensen, born in 1987, addresses this issue of climate change in Boreal Dreams (2024), an interactive, immersive work and online experience, commissioned for Northern Lights. The work uses virtual reality to connect past, present and future boreal ecosystems. It takes visitors on a journey into five imagined futures for the boreal forest, marrying technology with environmental data to create a visceral experience of nature. Yet, however bleak the future seems, raw nature – these works suggest – can offer something transcendent. "We like to think that it's possible for life to be one eternal summer," writes May in Wintering. "But life's not like that." By confronting and reframing winter, as these artists do, we can accept the seasonality of life, and cope better with the dark periods of our life. "Winter had blanked me, blasted me wide open," she declares. "In all that whiteness, I saw the chance to make myself new again." Northern Lights is at the Fondation Beyeler in Riehen/Basel in Switzerland until 25 May and at Buffalo AKG Art Museum, Buffalo, New York, from 1 August 2025 to 12 January 2026. The accompanying catalogue, edited by Ulf Küster, will be published by Hatje Cantz on 13 February. -- For more Culture stories from the BBC, follow us on Facebook, X and Instagram.
