Before this time of large-scale agriculture though, survival depended on an intimate attunement to seasonal patterns, the movement of animals, the flowering of plants, the subtle signals of weather and soil.

 

Anthropologists have long suggested that such knowledge was often shared widely within early communities, and biology itself offers some clues as to why this attunement may have been particularly developed in female bodies.​

 

Women, with their naturally wider field of awareness, played a central role in tracking these rhythms, while men tended to rely more on narrowly focused, target-oriented vision.

​​

Hormonal cycles governed by oestrogen and progesterone which also create recurring rhythms that shape perception and physiological states over the course of a month.​

So rather than operating on a single hormonal baseline, the female body moves through phases of expansion, energy, withdrawal, restoration, and repeat.

 

The female body is designed around cylindrical rhythm perfectly.

​

However, when agricultural societies developed they required something slightly different.

​

The subtle art of reading the landscape began to give way to the hard lines of ownership and enforcement, which by its nature, is structural and linear.

It requires authority and leadership and insistence on territory.

​And enforcement of territory does not easily bend to ebb and flow, rather it is driven by pride and ego.

​​​​​​​

Over time, questions of lineage and inheritance placed increasing emphasis on controlling women’s reproductive capacity, as a way of providing future stability within emerging property-based societies.

​

Woman were now expected to marry, therefore passing their free will to the opposite sex - their husband.

 

By the time early legal codes appear in Mesopotamia, including those of Sumer and later Babylon, we see written structures that formalise these hierarchies.

 

Inheritance, and sexual conduct become regulated not only socially but legally.

​

What may once have been fluid, maybe even freely negotiated, becomes prescribed and enforced.

 

Rather than revered for their role in creation, women increasingly found their reproductive capacity controlled for inheritance and property.

 

Obviously, none of this unfolded in cartoon villain style.​

As is the way with most forms of oppression, it gathers gradually, like water shaping stone, subtle enough at first that those living within it hardly notice the change taking place.​

Each small shift appears reasonable in isolation, rational thinking in response to economic change and survival pressures.

But over generations, the consolidation of authority around male lineage hardened into norm.

And once hardened, it became increasingly difficult to see as constructed at all.

 

Yet stepping back from it for even a moment invites an obvious question: why would one half of the species come to hold authority over the other?

Why would ownership and  authority come to rest in the hands of one sex and not both equally?

 

Those who benefited from the arrangement were hardly inclined to question it, while those who lived within its constraints rarely possessed the platform or power to challenge it.

In that sense, it begins to resemble the logic of a dictatorship: those who benefit from the structure defend it, while those constrained by it struggle to speak freely against it.

 

Across the animal kingdom, male physiology is shaped by a hormonal environment that favors bursts of outward energy.

Testosterone influences risk-taking, competition, territorial behavior, and the pursuit of status within social hierarchies.

​

None of these traits are inherently negative.

In many contexts they are useful.

​

Exploration, defense, innovation, and large-scale organisation all benefit from a willingness to push outward and to prioritize forward movement.

 

When such tendencies become embedded within systems of leadership and inheritance, they begin to shape the wider culture around them.

​

A society organised primarily around expansion and accumulation, will naturally privilege behaviors that mirror those priorities, so the ability to push forward becomes linked with strength and action.

 

Yet human cultures have long recognised that life rarely functions well through a single organising principle alone.

​

Many traditions speak of complementary forces that must remain in balance.

​

Chinese philosophy describes yin and yang, the receptive and the active, each incomplete without the other.

In other cultural imaginations the same relationship appears in different forms: the shadow pull of the moon alongside the radiance of the sun, the inward turn of winter balanced against the outward surge of summer.

​

One force moves outward, the other restores.

One drives and extends, the other senses and recalibrates.

 

Problems rarely arise from either principle on its own.

They emerge when one becomes dominant enough to drown out the other.

 

When the outward-driving impulse becomes the organising rhythm of an entire society, rest begins to appear less like a biological necessity and more like an interruption.

 

Stillness becomes difficult to justify within systems that reward constant movement.

 

What once functioned as a natural rhythm within human life begins to look like inefficiency.

 

In January’s edition, looking at Thresholds and liminal spaces, I wrote about the Greek understanding of time, which was divided into two distinct

forms. Chronos and Kairos.​

Chronos refers to the time that can be counted and measured.

Kairos describes a different quality of time altogether: the moment that must be inhabited and lived.

 

Patriarchy as a system has aligned itself far more comfortably with the measurable.

It privileges the clock, the deadline, goal setting, and the onward forward march.

Chronos time fits neatly inside structures built around productivity and expansion.

Kairos time, by contrast, resists scheduling.

It arrives through intuition, and presence.

It cannot easily be counted or controlled.

 

When a culture leans too heavily toward one mode of time, something subtle begins to disappear.

The rhythms that allowed bodies, and communities to recover within the pace of everyday life fade.

Like a tide that forgot to turn, leaving water endlessly pushing in one direction.

​​

This subject is written into bodies and into cultures, and shapes the assumptions we carry about our productivity, and worth.

​

And yet it would be dishonest to ignore what this forward momentum has produced.

The same drive that pushed human societies outward has brought extraordinary advances in medicine, science, technology, and knowledge.

​​​

Human civilization has achieved extraordinary things.

Vast Cathedrals made from stone lifted and sculpted into intricate arches and doorways.

Medicine has extended life in ways our ancestors could scarcely have imagined. Science learning to mend what illness carried away in mystery.

Technology now places music, and knowledge from across the world within reach of a small device held in the palm of a hand.

The laptop on which these words are written exists because thousands of minds, across generations, pushed relentlessly forward in invention, and problem solving.

​

Forward motion has built a brilliant modern world.

 

And yet no system that produces such momentum does so without shaping other parts of life along the way.

Every organising system carries a toll alongside its achievements.

Progress rarely arrives without cost, and the cost is not always counted in the same places as the achievement.

​​​

History holds countless examples of harm produced within patriarchal systems.​

Entire chapters of human experience bear its mark: centuries in which women were excluded from education, the silencing of female voices in public life, domestic violence, and the long struggle for something as basic as the right to vote.

​

The list is long enough to fill libraries, and this editorial could barely begin to account for it.

​

But suffering within such systems has never been experienced evenly.​

Patriarchy has rarely operated alone.

It has often intertwined with other hierarchies, such as race, and economic power, shaping whose labour is demanded most intensely and whose exhaustion is considered normal.

 

Writer and cultural theorist Tricia Hersey, founder of The Nap Ministry, speaks directly to this story.

In her work on rest, she describes how systems of exploitation have historically treated rest itself as a privilege rather than a biological necessity, particularly within the context of racial inequality and the legacy of forced labour.

Her work reminds us that rest has often been withheld most aggressively from those whose bodies were expected to produce the most.

 

She invites us to look at the question of rest as more than just personal wellbeing, but as cultural wellbeing.

 

But even outside these histories of injustice, the wider rhythm of modern life still carries the imprint of a system that favours constant motion.

​

Productivity is virtue in patriarchal systems.

Busyness is almost a statement of identity.

​And the result is something we have become so accustomed to we it scarcely notice it: a world in which many people move through life tired.

​

Tired not only from labour, but from the subtle pressure to keep producing underpinned by proving value through output.

Like an engine that keeps revving even after the foot lifts from the pedal.

 

Rest we are taught, must be earned.

Justified.

It must be dramatically announced and labelled proudly as self-care.

 

And when it cannot be justified, it is often accompanied by something else entirely, its arch nemesis.

‘Unrest’

​

Be honest, how many times have you taken the rest, only to find that something else arrives with you in the stillness?

A suggestion that you should be doing something else?

Or perhaps that you’re not worthy of this time?

Maybe someone somewhere is more productive than you are?

And then the classic feeling that time is slipping away.

 

If unrest and his accomplice guilt are present, can the nervous system truly enter restorative time?

Can the body settle into recovery while part of the mind remains on guard?

 

This is where the story returns to the system itself.

Because guilt is learned.

​

For generations we have been taught that rest must be justified.

That it should follow effort, not precede it.

That it must be earned rather than recognised as a basic biological requirement.

​

This is the point at which rest moves into the territory of something else entirely. Resistance.

 

A small refusal to accept the idea that human worth must always be proven through output.

​

One place I find myself practicing that resistance is in how I raise my children.

They are both in primary school.

One is naturally academic. The other less so.

Yet if either of them can listen carefully enough to their own body to say that they are too tired, too overwhelmed, or simply not well enough to meet the demands of a school day, then I advocate for them to rest.

​

That decision did not come easily.

​

The voice of the system is loud in a parent’s ear and so it meant learning to listen to my children’s bodies over the noise of social expectation.

 

Part of our journey as a family has included raising an autistic child whose learning has been interrupted at times for reasons beyond her control.

Through that experience I have had to confront my own inner dialogue, the internal voice asking whether allowing rest was irresponsible, whether I was somehow failing the system of schooling that measures success through attendance and endurance.

​

For the first four years of my children’s education they were in a school that, like many schools in the UK, pushed a very strong attendance line.

 

Its language was often alarmist.

Letters warned of the dangers of “six hours of lost learning,” calculating those hours across months and years until they appeared enormous.

 

The message was clear: absence was failure. Pushing through was virtue.

 

Yet my work places me daily in session with adults who are now trying to undo the consequences of that exact message.

Adults whose bodies no longer tolerate the belief that they must keep going at all costs.

​

I cannot knowingly install that thinking in my own children.​

So we offer a different one instead - when you are well and able, strive to do your best.

But your body must remain part of that conversation.

 

Rest is not a failure of discipline, it is part of the natural rhythm of being alive.

​

And even as I write this, I am aware of another truth.

My husband and I occupy a position that makes those choices possible.

Many families do not.

A single parent working multiple jobs may not have the option of prioritizing rest in the same way.

Economic pressure shapes these decisions long before philosophy ever enters the conversation.

 

Which brings us back to an uncomfortable reality; rest itself has become entangled with questions of power and privilege

For some, it is available.

For many, it is not.

​

And yet the biological need remains the same.

​

If the systems, we live inside, have normalized constant motion for centuries, then it is hardly surprising that stepping out of that rhythm can feel unnatural.

​

The body may crave stillness, yet the mind hesitates.

We have been trained, often without realising it, to measure worth through effort.

 

Sometimes it is easier to challenge a belief loudly than it is to loosen its grip softly.

It can feel strangely more comfortable to actively push-back on ideals with assertion and to openly declare that the system is wrong, than it is to sit down and allow ourselves to do nothing at all.

 

And yet it is precisely there, in those small moments of stillness, that the real shift begins.

Rest does not always arrive naturally in a culture that has trained us to distrust it.

If we are not inclined to take it between our responsibilities, then we may have to choose it deliberately. Almost actively.

 

In that sense, rest becomes something radical.

 

Not because lying down is dramatic, or because stopping is rebellious, but rather choosing rest intentionally interrupts a story we have been told for generations.

​

A return to a rhythm that human bodies have always required, even when the systems have taught us to ignore it.

Like stepping out of a rushing current so you can watch the river move past without you.

 

Rest was never meant to be the reward for survival.​

Rest was always meant to be simply part of the rhythm of being alive.

​

Perhaps the most hopeful thing about that rhythm is this: it does not require permission from any system to begin again.

 

And it is worth saying clearly that this invitation is not directed at women alone.

Patriarchal systems may historically have privileged men in positions of authority, but the culture of relentless forward motion they created has rarely spared the men who live inside it. Expectations of endurance, emotional restraint, and constant productivity have left many men carrying their own exhaustion.

​

Statistics repeatedly show that men are less likely to seek help when they reach the limits of what their bodies and minds can sustain. Burnout, mental health struggles, and isolation often go unnamed for longer than they should.

 

When a culture becomes organised almost entirely around forward motion, everyone eventually feels the strain.

Bodies tire.

Nervous systems fray.

Rest becomes something people must secretly negotiate with themselves rather than something openly woven into life.

 

Whether you are reading this as a woman, a man, or simply as a human body that feels the weight of the pace around you, the facts  remains the same.

Rest is a refusal to participate fully in a system that was never designed with human limits in mind.

 

In a world that prizes relentless activity, one of the most radical acts a person can take is to rest.