Peeling Potatoes 54: We’ll Do It Tomorrow

A conversation about active rest, cold coffee, clean sheets, boundaries, and the strange courage of doing slightly less.

We began with cold coffee.

Janita was sitting in South Africa, dressed as if she had been placed on the South Pole by accident. Her coffee was cooling too fast, but she was still using the cup to warm her hands. Her fingers were red from the cold.

Parts of Cape Town had snow. That was apparently enough to send the wind across the country and into her bones.

The Mayor, being helpful in the way only The Mayor can be helpful, suggested she speak to the authorities in Cape Town and ask them to keep their rubbish weather to themselves. Janita suggested they needed a barrier. He suggested a wall.

This is how we entered Active Rest.

Not with a yoga mat.

Not with a candle.

Not with a calm voice telling us to breathe deeply.

With cold hands, weather complaints, coffee, and the suspicion that rest is never as simple as it sounds.

The active rest quiz begins

The Mayor had come prepared.

This is always a dangerous sign.

He said he was willing to become a student of Fruitloop University, because Janita had proved many times that he still had a lot to learn. He also made it very clear that he was not a Cheerio, and that if she ever called him that again, their working relationship would have to be reviewed.

Janita accepted this seriously.

While laughing.

The topic was rest, and more specifically Active Rest. The Mayor had taken the day off the day before, travelled 200 kilometres to an exhibition, walked through crowds, looked at paintings that were not quite as Monet-heavy as promised, and had lunch with his mother.

His mother, we discovered, understands lunch in a very generous way.

Ice cream counts as lunch.

In fact, when his father was still alive, his parents would go on holiday and eat gigantic cups of ice cream with decorations and all the proper seriousness of a meal. His mother had a whole freezer drawer of different ice creams, like a private ice cream parlour with no need for prices.

So there we were.

Cold coffee in South Africa.

Ice cream lunches in Europe.

And a quiz about rest.

Rest, but with sushi in bed

The first sentence was simple.

Active rest sounds healthy, but in real life it usually means…

Janita already knew the answer.

The night before, they had chicken chow mein. Then, because it was cold, they decided to go to bed early. They ate dinner, took a shower, climbed into bed, and started watching a series.

Then they ate sushi in bed.

They were resting.

Actively.

This is the sort of answer that sounds like nonsense until you hear the truth inside it. Rest is not always tidy. Sometimes it is not even planned properly. Sometimes it is a series, a blanket, food that should maybe not be in bed, and the decision to stay warm.

The Mayor moved on.

Active rest sounds lovely until I realise it still requires me to…

Janita did not need long to find the problem.

Rest still requires something.

That was the beginning of the trouble.

The body asks before the brain agrees

The Mayor asked how her body asks for rest.

Janita had flu. She had been trying to shake it off, but her body was not cooperating. It was slowing her down whether she liked it or not.

That became one of the quiet truths of the conversation.

Sometimes the body asks politely.

Sometimes it sends a cold.

Sometimes it sends tiredness.

Sometimes it simply refuses to continue with our bright little plans.

The Mayor asked what kind of rest she finds acceptable.

The answer was not the rest where everything stops and everyone leaves her alone. That sounded almost too suspicious.

The acceptable kind of rest was the kind that still made sense inside family life. Sitting on the couch while her son watched cartoons. When he asked for food or a drink, she could say, “You know where this is. You know how to get yourself water.”

She was resting.

He was doing his own things.

Nothing exploded.

This became important later.

The chores that appear when rest arrives

The next trapdoor was familiar.

When Janita is supposed to rest, the chore she suddenly discovers is cleaning her office.

The office gets missed when the rest of the house is cleaned. So when she is meant to stop, she suddenly sees dust, a table that needs wiping, a floor that needs washing.

Then the windows enter the conversation.

She was already thinking about washing the windows at the weekend.

Maybe.

Maybe not.

The Mayor understood this immediately, because he too had looked at windows and thought dark thoughts. Kitchen windows. Living room windows. Office windows. Upstairs windows. Bathroom windows.

Windows are dangerous during rest.

They stand there quietly, pretending to be glass, but really they are accusations.

Clean sheets and other suspicious forms of rest

One of the best answers came when The Mayor asked about the activity that gets called rest even though it secretly drains us.

Janita said changing the bedsheets.

This made perfect sense.

In the end, she will sleep nicely. She will rest nicely. Clean sheets, tidy bed, fresh everything. But getting there is hard. It is a whole event. It promises future comfort while taking present energy.

That is a very clever trick.

The Mayor then had a memory about satin sheets.

He had once had them.

He did not recommend them.

He had never felt more uncomfortable in bedding.

So we added satin sheets to the growing list of things that sound better than they are.

Alongside underwhelming exhibitions, cold coffee, and rest that requires effort.

The inner critic does not approve

The Mayor asked what the inner critic would say if rest had to be approved.

Janita’s critic was direct.

“This is not rest. This is not rest. This is not rest.”

It was funny because it was too true.

The inner critic has no imagination. It sees you sitting down and immediately checks whether you are earning the sitting. It sees you watch a movie and asks whether you have created a to-do list in your head. It sees you lie down and asks whether the laundry has been dealt with.

For Janita, even watching a film on a Friday or Saturday night with her husband and son can become a place where her mind starts working. What is for dinner? What must still be done? What has been forgotten?

The body sits.

The mind keeps walking around the house with a clipboard.

Stopping the body is not the hardest part

Then the conversation moved deeper.

The hardest part of resting is not stopping the body.

It is stopping the mind.

For Janita, the mind keeps managing. It checks the house. It notices what is out of place. It sees what is in the way.

There is one space where this becomes simpler: her office.

Nobody comes in there.

Nobody touches her things.

Nobody messes around.

If it is untidy, it is her fault.

If it is tidy, it is also hers.

The Mayor remembered this from earlier conversations. My mess is my mess. Leave it alone.

There was humour in it, but there was also a boundary hiding inside it. A room where the mess belongs to you is not only a mess. It is a small kingdom.

If everyone survived the nap

The Mayor asked what would happen if Janita stopped being the capable one for one afternoon.

She said people might discover she can actually be lazy if she wants to.

The Mayor suggested she announce this to the South African media.

She refused.

But then she gave the evidence.

That week, because she had flu, she had told her husband she was going to lie down. Nothing fell apart. Everything was still standing. They had lunch. He cooked dinner a few times.

She took a nap.

The world continued.

She did not even feel guilty, because she was sick.

This is where the problem became visible.

Rest is easier to allow when illness gives it permission. If the body is officially unwell, rest becomes acceptable. If the body is only tired, stretched, full, or quietly warning us, rest still has to stand in court.

The mud bath problem

Janita likes rest.

But she does not fully trust it.

There is a reason.

A few months ago, she took a nap. While she was sleeping, her son went outside and built himself a mud bath.

This is not a metaphor.

This is domestic evidence.

This is why rest becomes suspicious. You close your eyes, and somewhere in the world a child invents a spa treatment from mud.

So when The Mayor asked why she keeps choosing forms of rest that allow her to remain available to everyone else, Janita answered plainly.

Boundaries are a big problem for her.

Even when she tries to nap, her son comes in to check whether she is really sleeping. If he sees her lying on her phone, trying to fall asleep, he runs to her husband and reports that she is not sleeping.

So it is not only her boundaries.

They are being tested.

Actively.

The rules we inherited

The conversation widened from housework into work itself.

The Mayor asked whose approval Janita might still be trying to earn by staying busy.

She thought it was mostly her own.

But she also connected it to how they were raised. Finish school. Study something. Find a job. Work the job. Nine to five. Or work yourself over the edge.

Her grandfather had worked for the same company for 60 years. Even after retirement, he still had a short-term contract with them. Her father had worked for the same company for 25 or 26 years.

Loyalty. Service. Staying. Continuing.

The Mayor recognised this. His father also worked for one company for more than 40 years. The company looked after him, financially and practically, through moves from city to city and country to country.

There was security there.

But the world has changed.

When The Mayor speaks to his mother about the way he works, and the way Brida works, her most pressing question is, “Where is the security?”

His answer is that the security is what you create yourself.

This is not a neat answer.

It is not comfortable.

But it belongs to the world we are in.

Busy can look like safety

The uncomfortable truth about busyness is that sometimes it helps us avoid going crazy.

Janita said this almost as a joke, but not only as a joke.

If she sits down and sees something out of place, something not where it is supposed to be, something in the way, she feels annoyed. Being busy gives her something to do with that feeling.

The Mayor made a German roadworks comparison, because of course he did.

Germans, he said, will find a hairline crack in the middle of nowhere and drill to the centre of the earth to make sure that crack never appears again.

He wondered if Janita does the same with crumbs.

A sandwich crumb appears, and suddenly the whole house must be rebuilt.

Janita objected.

Crumbs are okay.

Then she paused.

They do annoy her sometimes.

The pause was significant.

The promise we neglect

Near the end, The Mayor brought in his vegetable plot.

This could have sounded like a sudden change of topic, but it was not.

He had made a promise to himself after his heart attack, 10 or 11 years ago. The vegetable plot was meant to be a commitment to his health, his stability, and his mental state. He wanted to grow his own vegetables.

It went well for two years.

Then it fell away.

He resurrected it, but for several years now it has not worked properly. He looked at it and realised he needs help. He needs someone with the right tools to come in and help him lay the groundwork.

Not to do everything for him.

To help him return to a promise he made to himself.

That was the bridge.

Janita’s rest.

The Mayor’s vegetable plot.

The bike not yet ridden.

The exercise not yet restarted.

The nap not yet trusted.

The small promise to health that keeps being pushed to tomorrow because everyone and everything else seems louder.

Active interest

The Mayor said maybe we need to take a more active interest in the people we meet regularly.

Not doomscrolling.

Not watching from a distance.

Actually asking.

How is your fitness training going?

Have you ridden the bike?

Have you gone for a run?

Have you made progress?

And then celebrating small victories.

Because small victories are not small when someone is trying to change a pattern that has been running for years.

Janita listened.

She had already found her own takeaway.

She needs to care a little less.

Set boundaries.

Take a nap without guilt.

Nothing is going to explode.

Nothing is going to fall apart.

Everything will be fine.

That is quite a lot to learn from cold coffee and a quiz.

We’ll do it tomorrow

By the end, Janita’s husband was washing the floor.

This was excellent news.

The Mayor said he deserved a hug and a medal.

Janita said they had no responsibilities that weekend. Not the normal routine pressure. Not the rush of dinner, shower, bedtime, and all the little domestic gears turning at once.

They could relax.

She might take a nap.

Or lie on the bed and watch the series.

There was still someone coming to check things around the house, and she would have to keep the dogs away, especially one particular dog, but this was manageable.

The Mayor was also going into his own version of Active Rest. A hike with Fabrice at 7 o’clock. He did not fully know where they were going. He only knew he had been told to wear long trousers, decent shoes, and take walking sticks.

Janita reminded him to take enough water.

And snacks.

This is care.

This is Brida, in its ridiculous ordinary clothing.

We speak about rest, and somehow we end up with sushi in bed, mud baths, German roadworks, clean sheets, AI, job security, vegetable plots, cold coffee, and walking sticks.

But underneath all of that, the question is simple.

Can we rest before we are completely exhausted?

Can we stop earning every pause?

Can we let tomorrow carry what does not need to be carried today?

Janita found the motto for the weekend.

We’ll do it tomorrow.

Not as avoidance.

As mercy.

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