Londiwe Buthelezi
14 October 2026
Rest has become something we feel we must earn. Perhaps it is time we stopped asking for permission.
There was a time when the shops closed at 5 pm on weekdays and 1 pm on Saturdays. Sunday afternoons belonged to a nap and a pot of tea on the patio, and work waited until Monday because the office was, quite literally, shut.
Today, a long weekend is rarely a break. It is a social calendar: the braai to host, the destination to reach, the market to visit, the hike to complete. Ask someone what they did over the holiday and the answer arrives as a checklist. Tell them you did nothing at all, and you may be met with disbelief.
Doing nothing, it seems, now needs a chaperone.
“It’s a shame that genuine rest needs an excuse,” says Onwaba Gonyora, Director of Brahman Hills, a five-star hospitality and wellness destination in the heart of the KwaZulu-Natal Midlands. She is careful to say what rest is not. “By rest, I don’t mean laziness or simply lying around. I mean choosing to slow down, be still and give yourself permission to properly switch off.”
The idea is hardly new. The Italians call it dolce far niente, the sweetness of doing nothing. The Danes have hygge, the comfort and contentment found in simple, unhurried moments. Different words, same conviction: rest and leisure are worth pursuing.
Modern life makes that conviction hard to act on. We carry our work in our pockets, and our leisure has begun to look suspiciously like work: optimised, tracked, photographed, posted. Holidays are planned like projects, with itineraries so tightly packed that people return in need of a holiday from their holiday. Somewhere in the planning, the point of rest gets lost.
So what does doing nothing well look like? Gonyora argues it starts with permission. “Not the permission you ask for from a boss or a calendar, but the internal kind, the quiet decision that an afternoon spent watching the light change over a garden, or a morning with nowhere particular to be, has value in itself. It doesn’t need to produce anything. It doesn’t need a caption.”
It also helps to have the right surroundings. “Doing nothing well is hard in a cluttered, noisy, demanding space, which is probably why so many of us reach for nature when we finally do slow down,” she says. “Space seems to give permission that willpower alone often can’t.”
Even then, rest is a skill that takes practice. Gonyora admits the first few hours can be the hardest. “I have personally found that the mind keeps reaching for its to-do list like a phantom limb. It’s usually only once that noise finally quietens that we start to remember what unstructured time actually feels like.”
That is why the places we choose for rest matter, and why stepping away from the familiar can help us reset. At Brahman Hills, she says, the team has deliberately created spaces where people don’t have to be constantly doing something.
Not everyone can leave the city for the Midlands, and Gonyora’s advice for those who can’t is modest. If you can, get away: head for the countryside and give yourself a few days with nowhere to be and nothing to achieve. If you can’t, start smaller. Leave one Saturday unplanned. Don’t fill every hour. Put the phone down, sit outside, take a nap, read a book, or simply do nothing for a while.
Rest doesn’t have to be earned. Perhaps we just need to get better at allowing ourselves to have it.
