Throughout my experiment I noticed that whenever I felt worried or pressured about whether I was happy enough, joy eluded me. It is not the way of joy to be grasped. Rest is like unclenching a fist, letting go of the need to do or to know, in order that receiving might take the place of grasping. If we aren’t willing to rest, God will arrange rests for us, because He doesn’t want us to rush through life but to enjoy it.
One interesting property of happiness is that we cannot be happy without knowing it. We can be many other things — rich, blessed, lucky, loved — and not know it, but to be happy we must know it. The awareness is a part of the happiness. Rest is an opportunity to become aware of joy. We need sleep because we need dreams, and we need rest because we need daydreams.
— Mike Mason, Champagne for the Soul, p. 12