There is a painting at the Norton of a woman doing nothing, and it undid me.
She sits in a floral robe with her hands loosely folded, a cup somewhere near, the dark behind her warm rather than menacing. She is not waiting for anyone. She is not between tasks. She has the particular stillness of a person who has closed the door, turned off her phone, and decided the afternoon belongs to her.
I stood in front of her longer than was reasonable—the way you linger near a stranger who reminds you of someone—and then realized the someone was a version of me I hadn’t met in a while.
The exhibition is Danielle Mckinney: Shelter.
Room after room of Black women smoking, reading, half-asleep in beautiful interiors, none of them performing for the viewer, all of them somewhere I couldn’t follow. The wall text said something I’ve been turning over since: that authority over your own time is its own kind of luxury.
Mckinney put it more plainly.
“There’s beauty in rest”
I typed it into my phone like a reminder I might actually take.
Here is what I do for a living: I make other people sound like themselves, only better.
I write the words people say when the stakes are high and the room is full. It is good work and I am good at it, and it means I spend my days exquisitely, relentlessly on—anticipating, drafting, fixing the sentence before it is ever spoken aloud.
By the time the weekend arrives, I have given away all my words.
What’s left of me wants to lie down.
And I won’t let it.
Because somewhere along the way I learned that stillness has to be earned, and the earning never quite ends.
I grew up believing there was always one more thing to do before you could rest. Finish the homework. Clean the room. Help your mother. Prepare for tomorrow. The list simply changed shape as I got older.
I learned to mistake motion for virtue.
I learned that a day with nothing in it was a day I’d have to answer for.
So even now, on a Sunday, I will invent the errand, manufacture the urgency, find the small productive thing—so I don’t have to sit with the uncomfortable truth that I am tired, and allowed to be.
This week I tried, badly, to practice.
I let a café cubano go warm at Tinta y Café while I did nothing but watch the light move across the room. I let lunch stretch into an afternoon and didn’t check the time once, which for me is a kind of extreme sport.
I’ve been reading The Warmth of Other Suns, Isabel Wilkerson’s account of people who left everything to find a place where they could finally exhale, and I keep thinking that rest and home are the same search wearing different clothes.
We are all just looking for somewhere we’re allowed to stop.
Mckinney’s women already know this.
That’s what the paintings are—not pictures of leisure but pictures of permission.
The robe, the cigarette, the unmade afternoon: these aren’t luxuries because they cost anything. They’re luxuries because the woman has decided, fully, that no one is owed her attention.
Not the phone.
Not the inbox.
Not the version of herself keeping a running tally of everything left undone.
I am not there yet.
I checked my email twice while writing this.
But I’m learning to recognize the feeling when it arrives—the small click of a door closing, an afternoon turning private—and to stay inside it a beat longer than is comfortable.
To let the coffee go cold on purpose.
The luxury, it turns out, was never the room.
It was having nowhere to be.
Isabelle Alerte is the writer behind In Written Word, an editorial site on place, taste, and lived experience. She lives in Miami.
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