“I will never understand you, Jon Katz…..Do you understand yourself? I know you have a heart, but you have trouble showing it….why? – Sally, G.

I’ve had a few doctor visits in the past week, and each one of them, and then my wife said I needed to rest.

The most recent was Thursday, when my dentist, who had just dug a deep hole in my jaw to extract a tooth and clean up an infected gum, said, “listen, Jon, you need to rest for a day or two; take it easy.”

Maria, who was in the room, laughed, “you must be kidding,” she said, “Jon never rests.” He laughed, and I admitted to being startled. I recall Maria urging me to take it easy occasionally, but I was shocked to hear she thought I had never rested and could not rest.

I admit to being exhausted after this week, and I will do my best to rest once I figure out what that means. My mind does not sleep, and I don’t believe in taking sleeping pills, so I am at a crossroads – needing to rest but not quite sure how.

And if you can read the piece all the way through, you will see what I saw – a great example of how my mind works and how it defeats the idea of rest.

I thought  I was doing better than this, but perhaps not.

In my mind, I rest all the time. I’m just learning that this is not actual rest.

I rest when we go off to our beloved inn for a day once or twice a year, and it seems that I rest most days in my quiet hour. And, of course, I rest when I sleep, which is admittedly touch and go.

The more I thought about it, the more I understood what Maria was saying, and she was right. I don’t know how to rest, I realize. I am embarrassed to say I don’t know what resting would be for me.

I write and take photos and read daily; I blog every day and will soon walk again every day.

How would rest look for me? I rest when I meditate and in bed when I’m up early. I sleep in the car when I’m going somewhere.

And I rest when I read.

I also rest when Maria and I sometimes stream mysteries or comedies in the evening. And when we listen to Cafe Lena, music streamed on cold or stormy winter nights. I rest when listening to Leonard Cohen, Paul Simon, Gregorian Chant, and Bonnie Raitt.

I relax at the Mansion in Meditation Class and at Bishop Gibbons when I see the refugee kids and Sue Silverstein.

I also relax when walking Zinnia. Isn’t that enough relaxation? I’ll be dead in a few years; how much relaxing do I want to do now?

As I write this, I see the problem; it becomes a bit clearer that these things are not really restful and indeed not what Maria and the doctors suggest.

I’m going to think about this and write about it some more. Then I will sit in my chair and read T.J. Klune’s The House In The Gerulian Sea. I love it and can’t wait to spend the rest of the afternoon with it.

He is a new and imaginative writer that I am liking very much.

Isn’t this relaxing?

And I’ll tell the truth; I rest when I write; I love writing; it is never working or stressful for me. I even like reading the lovely and sometimes crazy messages I get. Sometimes they dance in my head, and please remember that I suffer from mental illness – anxiety –  to begin with.

When I said my income had dropped to the point I happily don’t owe any taxes this year, I immediately got a blog message from someone named Edwina I had never heard of, saying I should stop whining because she knew I earned $32,000 a month.

Maria and I got a good laugh out of that one. I was speechless for a minute or two. We are still laughing.

Social media has surpassed the imagination of the best writer. People make shit up and send it out there. Other people believe it. No wonder we are starting to hate each other.

Good luck, Edwina; I hope you feel better. Check your meds.

Social media never ceases to amaze me; how would anyone get a crazy idea like this and state it as a known fact? Is our world going totally bonkers? Is Truth hiding in a cave, crying, tied up to a chair? Does it mean anything to anyone but oddballs like me?

After all, I am sadly “woke,” I like helping children and poor people and telling the truth about history and climate change; I don’t tell other people who to love or who they are.

I thought those were good things. I still do.

This is what happened, I think,  to all of the disturbed people when they shut the asylums down. They all went on social media or, in some cases, run it. Many others got themselves elected to Congress. Insanity is a new sanity.

But the good thing for me is that I’m starting to laugh, not burn. It took me a few years. That is a big deal and a huge step forward for me. If you can’t beat it, use it.

As to Sally, I loved her message, poor thing,  although she is getting desperate.

A critic of my political writing, she has been trying to diagnose me for years now in the hope of making me friendlier to people like Edwina, who come onto my site periodically to take a dump on me.

They don’t generally help me rest.

Sally wants me to be a sweeter, poor thing. She’s getting nowhere.

I told her my heart belonged only to Maria and no one else could ever have it.

So reading over this, I am beginning to understand what people mean when they say I can’t rest.

I sat down to write about resting, suddenly veered off, and wrote about crazy messages from troubled people. They were on my mind.

I guess I answered my own question.

My mind is always racing from one thing to another, going where it wants to go, not where I tell it to go.

So now I will show Maria that I can rest, sleep, and slow things down in my head. I’ll even make myself a cuppa, maybe popcorn later.

If that isn’t resting and relaxing, I don’t know what is.