Do you find yourself sitting around doing nothing – or doing nothing that is tied to a concrete outcome or goal?

Do you often feel guilty for spending time resting, daydreaming, or lazing about? Or are they important parts of your daily life?

In the guest essay “The most precious thing I can teach my child is how to be lazy,” Elliot Kukla, a rabbi who provides spiritual care to those who are grieving, dying, sick, or disabled, writes that he “saw the limits of the grind. His essay begins:

“Abba, I have an idea,” says my 3-year-old son. “Put on your pajamas and big mask, turn off the light and get into bed.”

“Sounds good,” I said honestly. I put on my sleep apnea mask, put on some soft, worn cotton pajamas, and crawl under the fluffy white duvet with him. Within seconds, he is asleep to the familiar soft wheeze of my breathing apparatus. He knows well the sight and the sound of my sleeping body; I have lupus, an autoimmune disease that causes chronic fatigue. On a good day, I can get by on about 10 hours of sleep. When my condition flares up, sometimes for weeks, I need to sleep most of the day and night.

Before my child was born, I was afraid that my fatigue would make it impossible for me to be a good parent. And it’s true that I often juggle parental needs and exhaustion. What I didn’t anticipate is that prioritizing rest, sleep, and dream is also something tangible that I can offer my child.

He sees me taking a nap every day and he wants to come in. We build elaborate nests and stare out the window together, luxuriously propped up on huge mounds of pillows. Most 3-year-olds I know struggle with bedtime, but we cuddle under the covers on cold winter evenings, sighing with synchronized joy.

America in 2022 is an exhausting place to live. Almost everyone I know is tired. We’re tired of answering work emails after dinner. We are tired of caring for elderly family members in a crumbling aged care system, of worrying about a mass shooting at our children’s schools. We are tired of untreated grief, untreated illness and depression. We are tired of wildfires becoming a reality in the West, floods and hurricanes hitting the South and East. We are really tired of this endless pandemic. Most of all, we are exhausted trying to carry on as if everything is fine.

The test ends:

Laziness is more than the absence or avoidance of work; it is also the pleasure of lazing in the sun, or in the arms of another. I’ve learned through my hospice work that moments spent enjoying the company of an old friend, savoring the smell of coffee, or catching a warm breeze can make even the end of life more enjoyable. As the future grows dimmer, I want to teach my child to enjoy the planet right now. I want to teach him to laze in the grass and watch the clouds without any artificially imposed sense of urgency. Many ways I have learned to live well in a chronically ill body – taking the present moment slowly and gently, letting go of seeking certainty about the future, napping, dreaming, nurturing relationships and loving fiercely – are relevant to anyone living on this planet with chronic illnesses.

Certainly, it is my privilege that allows me to teach my child to be lazy. Many people in this country and elsewhere spend all of their time working, with some working multiple jobs. Many still struggle to find housing and food. For too many people, laziness is not an option.

But rest should not be a luxury; our time belongs to us and is not inherently a commodity. Reclaiming our time is an act of sovereignty over our lives, deserved by all. “Rest,” says Siesta Bishop, black activist Tricia Hersey, “is a radical vision of a liberated future.”

Today my child and I are playing a hill game. We’re lying under a giant pile of every blanket in the house, pretending to be a hill strewn with soft grass. His hot breath is on my neck, his skinny limbs spread across my soft belly.

“Hush, Abba,” he said. “The hills don’t move and talk…they stand still and grow things.”

I’m teaching my child to be lazy, and so far it’s going great.

Students, read the whole essay, then tell us:

• What points raised by Rabbi Kukla resonate with you? Where do you disagree with him, and why?

• Do you agree that rest is stigmatized, especially in the United States? Can you give an example from your own life, or something you have seen or heard of, where rest or laziness was looked down upon?

• Do you think laziness can be a good thing? Rabbi Kukla argues that prioritizing rest could help people take better care of themselves, others, and our world. Describe in your own words what it might look like. Or, if you disagree, explain why these actions would not bring change.

• The essay states: “It is the poor, the homeless, the young, the black, the brown, the mentally ill, the fat and the chronically ill who are most often accused of laziness. We rarely hear of lazy billionaires, no matter how much of their inherited wealth. What is your reaction to this statement? Does this correspond to what you have seen or experienced in the world? Why or why not?

• If you were given an entire day in which you had nothing to accomplish and you had nothing to be productive at all, how would you spend it? Would you take the opportunity to rest? Would you feel bad about taking a break? Would you choose to work instead?

Want more write prompts? You can find all of our questions in our Student Opinion column. Teachers, check out this guide to learn how you can integrate them into your classroom.

Students aged 13 and over in the US and Britain, and 16 and over elsewhere, are invited to comment. All comments are moderated by Learning Network staff, but remember that once your comment is accepted, it will be made public.