A clock ticking downward
I have a magnet on my refrigerator that my children gave me for Mother’s Day last year, a quote from Omar Khayam.
“Be happy for this moment, for this moment is your life.”
It is one of a number of adages I try to keep in mind and live by, but I find I am living against the grain. Our culture encourages us to find our identity in our past and send our contentment into some distant future (When I … ). But more importantly, we are not encouraged to be happy. Distracted, yes — ’successful,’ absolutely. We are encouraged to chase happiness, buy happiness, fly to happiness. But the only path to happiness — the ‘be’ — is not in our cultural vocabulary.
Today I had the pleasure of interviewing Dr. Gabor Mate (http://www.drgabormate.com), author of When the Body Says No: The Cost of Hidden Stress. The subject of the interview was the importance of self-care for those providing elder care, but Dr. Mate refused to be steered toward blithe sound bytes and advice.
Instead, he talked about the fact that the way we experience life events — and the intensity of stress we experience — is subjective. People who experience the greatest degree of stress are often those who have adopted care-giving as part of their identity from childhood. They take up caregiving roles because they feel they have to do so. Their family members often expect them to do so as well, because the family roles have also been firmly established. In other words, the sometimes untenable stress of elder caregiving is not in the doing, but in the being. To manage that stress, caregivers must begin by becoming aware of the patterns that cause them to take on too much, to react negatively to events, and to neglect their own needs.
To one of my attempts to guide him into a laundry list of how-to tips, Dr. Mate expressed his belief that, as a society, we are far too quick to jump to the ‘how.’
Surrendering to this idea, I have been thinking since the interview about the ‘be’ of self-care and its antithesis, stress.
I’ve long since rebelled against the insidious but very common idea that it is noble to suffer and deprive the body of healthful food, connection with nature and the replenishment and restoration of play and sleep.
I work at home and am religious about spending 10 of each 24 hours in my bed. (90 minutes for reading, 8 hours for sleeping, 30 minutes for transitions.) It’s a lot, unheard of — unmanageable for most people, and for me until I freed myself from traditional employment. But I have found it is necessary for me. Without those precious hours, my mind is sluggish and yet unable to focus, my short term memory is diminished, my physical and emotional resilience deserts me, my head aches and my stomach is upset. (All of these symptoms and more have been identified as common among the sleep deprived.) But I’m very aware of how out of sync I am in making these choices — we’re far more likely to share the fact that we’re sleep-deprived than to admit we make choices and even sacrifices to ensure we get as much as we need.
It is an example of our general philosophy about caring for ourselves — we approach it as a luxury. It is one of many vital issues I’m convinced we approach in exactly the wrong, up-is-down way.
How often we hear — or say — “I’d love to have time to … (exercise, prepare healthier food, spend more time with the people I love, read, etc.).” But we are like clocks winding down. Unless we replenish ourselves, fill ourselves up with the elements and experiences that energize us, we have less and less to contribute each day. We are deluded into believing that operating on less sleep and working more is somehow more virtuous — while in reality, we are choosing slow self-destruction.
Like the mythical frog in the pot that allows itself to be boiled because the temperature rises so slowly, we sacrifice our best selves — our full potential as creators, lovers, parents, world citizens — to the idea that we are somehow better if we manage with five hours sleep and cope with chronic stress.
Our needs are those things we require to be our best. If they are not met, we are not our best. We have cheated ourselves, those we love and the world of that glorious possibility — our best.
Who would you be if all of your needs were met? And if you will not be the warrior who slays dragons to ensure your needs are met, who will be?