The Work I Kept Treating As Rest
I was in Nakumatt when I was twenty-two and saw a small washing machine sitting on a counter. I bought it immediately.
I had someone helping at home, but she could not wash my personal stuff (obviously), and I hated washing clothes. Not because I was/ I am lazy, well, yes, sometimes I am, especially on stuff I consider a waste of energy.
When I started earning money, one of the first things I did was bring running water from the well into my mother’s house. Nobody asked me to.
Innovation, for me, has never been about creating something flashy.
What is consuming unnecessary energy, and how do I redesign it so that energy can be used for living instead of surviving?
For the past two years, I have been building what began as AxisGPT: a shadow work companion that kept becoming more than I planned. A place where AI, astrology, ancestral work, daily reflection, and shadow work could stop living in separate boxes and finally speak to each other.
The first thing I have ever built where every part of me gets to come to work.
And for almost all of these two years, I kept treating it as something I did before my real work started.
I would pick up shifts, come home, work on the website, write another article, build another feature, and tell myself: once I finish this, then I will begin.
Today’s teaching was named something I had not been able to see clearly.
Matías De Stefano speaks about the religious inheritance many of us still carry without realizing it: the belief that work comes first, rest comes after, and paradise is the reward for sufficient suffering. Even when we no longer believe the theology, many of us still live the structure.
I had quietly turned my life’s work into the thing I did before my life could begin.
The shift that happened today during meditation feels both incredibly small and completely irreversible.
Axis is not something I need to finish. It is not a side project, not a bridge toward my real career.
It is the first thing I have built that contains everything I care about, and I have been calling it a detour.
I think the belief underlying all the others was this: the work that feels most like me cannot also sustain me.
That belief is convincing because bills are real. Rent is real. Children need stability. I will not romanticize uncertainty: I will still pick up shifts because, right now, they help my nervous system remember that we are safe while this ecosystem grows.
Safety allows creativity to keep building.
Yesterday, I picked up my son and suggested we go to a park. He immediately resisted.
Not that park again. I do not want to go.
I took him anyway.
The park he thought he knew had been turned into a splash park. He played in the water the entire afternoon. On the way home, I mentioned that he had been so negative, and he said something that stopped me:
How can you know something will be good before you go?
I told him: “ You cannot always know. But the negativity is just your heart trying to protect itself from disappointment. If you go with curiosity instead (if it is bad, it is a lesson; if it is good, it is a gift), you lose less time protecting yourself from something that might be wonderful.
He looked at me the way children look at you when they know you are also talking to yourself.
He was right. I was.
Earlier, he had asked whether I would still be driving him around when we are old.
I laughed and told him there would be self-driving cars by then; they are here already.
Then another thought arrived: by then, he will probably be driving me.
That is innovation. Not rejection of what was. Just allowing reality to become what it is becoming.
And releasing my grip on yesterday’s version of how things work.
Axis will change. It will become things I cannot predict today: new tools, retreats, books, conversations, and ideas I have not imagined yet. Just as I have changed, it will keep changing.
For the first time, I can honestly say something I could not have said one year ago.
It is completely okay if I spend the rest of my life cultivating this.
Not because I know where it ends.
Because I finally understand it was never supposed to.
🤍
When Eva is not redesigning the energy something unnecessarily costs, she is learning to stop treating her own life’s work as the thing she does before her real life begins.
She writes about the worth wound, shadow work, and what it looks like to stop calling your life’s work a detour, one honest essay at a time.
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