I’m tired today.

I thought I can’t write anything. I can’t think. I just need to rest.

So I switched off my macbook. I took a long hot shower. I put on some tracksuit bottoms and a favorite black T-shirt and I pulled on a thin sweater. I went downstairs and made a cup of fresh hot tea. 

I was thinking about my week. I thought I’d had some week: Six 16 hour days. 9am planning sessions. 3pm Boardroom meetings. 6pm Conference calls. 9pm skype calls. Sending revisions through at 12:30 at night. I did the work nicely. I know that, I thought…But now I’m tired. And I don’t want to think about the work. I don’t want to think about anything. I just want some time off. I just want to rest.

And now, In this silent space I’ve created for myself, all I can think is what a blessing it is that I can – REST that is. What a miracle it is that when I get tired, I get to rest.  The ‘small’ things, I’m reminded, are everything.

I am thinking of Haiti. Where will the people there rest? When did many of them last rest before this? How will they rest now?

Yesterday I watched a piece posted online at Time Video  http://su.pr/9fBFYK  showing a hospital in Port Au Prince where the people treating the injured said they thought many of them would die soon after being treated: "there’s no food for them, no where for them go, they have to leave…we can’t keep them here". There was a five year old boy there who had had his leg amputated and was without any pain medications or food – crying.  

He, I think, must be just so tired. So very much in need of tenderness and total rest.

Those people, after all they’ve suffered and seen, when they must be in unimaginable states of exhaustion, shock and trauma – are being told to get up and to leave with absolutely nowhere for them to go. The hospital staff knowing that what happens next is likely to be the death of the people whose lives they’ve just tried to save.

Not everyone gets to rest.

There are about 4m people in Haiti who will deprived of rest tonight by a natural disaster over which they had no control.  

There are 27m people worldwide who will be deprived of rest tonight by another disaster which is very much in our collective control.

****

27m people who are slaves – human beings who have been trafficked –  bought by one person, sold or exchanged to another for their sexual, manual or physical exploitation. Around 8.4m of them are children.

That’s 8.4m children right now – tonight – forced in to prostitution, forced in to physical labour, forced to traffick drugs and guns – by adults. Isolated. Uncared for – unlikely to receive enough food or sleep. At risk of being violently, sexually, physically abused by their adult exploiters at any given moment.

I think about how fragile I think we all feel when we are really really tired – how close to tears we get, how quickly we lose clarity, how overwhelmed we feel by all the things we find ourselves committed to (voluntarily or not) in our world.

What must it be like to be a human being who can not stop to rest. 

I know for myself how consciously I engage in my own ritual of the hot shower, the comfortable clothes, the hot tea – the time to look over what I’ve been engaged in that I now need to break from, for a while.

I realise my life – and yours too if you are able to rest when you need it – is a miracle.

Not all lives are so.

Everyone gets tired. And not everyone gets to rest.

****

But everyone does get to choose what kind of world they want to create.

We all get to choose whether or not we think it’s OK for some people in our world, who might not have suffered an earthquake, but whose lives are similarly displaced by trafficking – to live in unsafe conditions that must exhaust them beyond measure – and from which they have no rest.

Exploitation of the vulnerable is a form of violence made possible, i think, by the inaction of the strong.

Action is something we also all get to choose.

We won’t every one of us be the dynamic activists in our communities:  awareness raising and advocating movements for  change. And even if we are that for a time, we won’t always be that person for every day of the rest of our lives.

But we will, every one of us, for every day for the rest of our lives, be members of our communities: and I’m thinking maybe that requires a more personal, but maybe a more deeply committed form of activism: being kind, being compassionate, being loving, being giving – in every thought, action and deed.

The truth is If we each of us on this planet  lived out our personal lives like that – there simply couldn’t be the violent practice of human trafficking in our world. 

Sometimes this week I’ve gotten overwhelmed watching things descend in to violence in Haiti, watching people losing their lives because there’s nowhere for them to rest, and thinking about human trafficking stories of young children as young as 9 being trafficked to work in the sex industry.  

I’ve thought…what more  can I do? I’m so far away. And some days I’ve thought…I’m so tired.

I thinking that maybe my answer is in how I’m feeling – when I am tired, I get to rest.

Because tonight, some 9 year old girls in India, along with many vulnerable children in Haiti who have been displaced, and 8.2m other children who are trafficked in to child slavery in all nations of the world, from Russia to the USA to China to the UK, won’t get to rest. 

Not because there was an earthquake. But because more people chose not to dedicate their actions to non violence than a minority of people who have let violence inform theirs.

For those children – for all children – I think what I have to remember is that even at my most tired I can support them in every moment through my vow of personal activism: that in my every thought, action and deed, I am contributing to the creation of a non violent world – one in which all people get to rest.

I don’t always have to worry about whether I am ‘doing’ enough ‘out there’ all the time. 

I have to first be mindful of how I am ‘being’ in every moment as I contribute to creating a world where all people, especially children, when they are tired, get to rest.

Join me – Be the change.

www.itakethevow.com

National Human Trafficking Awareness Month continues to Feb 12th.

Support Haiti here:

www.HaitiFoodProject.org

www.unicef.org/

Read a statement by UNICEF Executive Director Ann M Veneman on the situation of children in Haiti here: bit.ly/5AT8MY

Learn more about the issues behind human trafficking and how you can help here:

www.stopthetraffik.org/

PHOTO: Flickr / randomurl