Rest is a fine medicine. Let your mind go into strange, untouched places. — May Sarton
—What lingers after this line?
One-minute reflection
Why might this line matter today, not tomorrow?
Rest Beyond Mere Idleness
May Sarton’s line begins with a deceptively simple claim: rest heals. Yet she isn’t praising laziness or escape so much as naming rest as a deliberate remedy, like something prescribed. In that framing, rest becomes an active choice to stop forcing outcomes and to let the inner system recalibrate. From there, the quote quietly shifts our attention from the body to the mind. If rest is medicine, then exhaustion is not just physical depletion—it is also a narrowing of imagination, patience, and perspective. Sarton's opening invites us to treat mental recovery with the same seriousness we give to physical recovery.
A Doorway to Unvisited Inner Terrain
Having established rest as healing, Sarton immediately adds a surprising instruction: “Let your mind go into strange, untouched places.” The logic is subtle but coherent—true rest is not only stopping work; it is changing mental scenery. When the mind repeats the same worries and familiar scripts, it may be “resting” in time but not in experience. So she proposes a gentler alternative: loosen your grip on the known. In practice, that might mean allowing daydreams, drifting attention, or quiet curiosity to replace productivity. Rest, in her view, restores not only energy but also the capacity for discovery.
Why Strangeness Can Be Restorative
The word “strange” might sound unsettling at first, yet Sarton treats it as nourishing. After all, the familiar can become exhausting when it’s saturated with obligation—tasks, roles, and expectations. By contrast, “strange” mental territory can feel spacious precisely because it isn’t yet claimed by duty. This is where her phrase “untouched places” matters: it implies regions of thought and feeling that haven’t been overused. Much like a path in nature that hasn’t been trampled, these inner places can renew us because they are not already crowded with rehearsed arguments or habitual self-judgment.
Creativity as a Byproduct of Recovery
Once the mind is allowed to roam, creativity tends to arrive without being summoned. Sarton's advice aligns with a common artistic truth: invention often follows rest, not strain. Instead of squeezing the mind for solutions, you create conditions in which insight can appear naturally. Virginia Woolf’s “A Sketch of the Past” (published posthumously, 1976) reflects on moments of “being” that arise when attention is unforced; these moments often carry a surprising clarity. In the same spirit, Sarton suggests that when the mind wanders into unfamiliar inner spaces, it can return with new images, kinder interpretations, or unexpected connections.
The Quiet Courage of Letting Go
Sarton uses the verb “let,” and that choice implies trust. Letting the mind go is different from directing it; it means tolerating uncertainty and resisting the impulse to micromanage your thoughts. For many people, that is the hardest part of rest: the fear that if you stop controlling, you’ll fall behind. But the quote argues, gently, that control is not always strength. Sometimes the braver act is to loosen the reins long enough for the psyche to breathe. In that pause, emotions that were muted by busyness can surface and resolve, making rest not just pleasant but genuinely medicinal.
A Practical Rhythm: Retreat and Return
Finally, Sarton's idea implies a healthy cycle: retreat into rest, wander into the unfamiliar, then return changed. Rest is not the end of engagement with life; it is what makes engagement richer and less brittle. The mind that has visited “untouched places” often comes back with more flexibility—less reactive, more able to see options. In everyday terms, this might look like a quiet walk without headphones, an afternoon nap, reading poetry with no goal, or simply sitting long enough for thoughts to drift past their usual ruts. Through such small practices, Sarton's counsel becomes a sustainable rhythm: heal, explore, and re-enter the world with renewed depth.