For most of my life I’ve rushed headlong into things. I’ve hurried and flurried about, trying to do all things for all people all the time. I say “Yes” far too often without considering all the ramifications of what I’ve just agreed to, and then sink into a pool of regret a moment later. I get swept up in feelings, most of them negative – anxiety, loss, sadness, insecurity. I busy myself trying to make everything perfect and make everyone around me happy all the time and mostly make myself unhappy in the process. I overreact to emotional situations and then resort to numbing behaviors to calm myself down.
How has it taken me 65 years of life on earth to figure out there might be a better way to live?
Maybe it’s really a gift of those 65 years to have the time and experience to notice. We get into the hustle habit when we’re young, trying to make a mark in our careers and families while believing we have all the time in the world to live a happy, fulfilled life for ourselves. Women especially take on the role of caretaker to such an extent that we sacrifice essential self-care believing it’s our duty to put others needs first. Remember - as the airplane safety analogy goes, you have to put on your own oxygen mask first before helping others put on theirs.
Several months ago I realized how badly I was craving a sense of peace for my life, how I needed to slow down, calm down, settle down. I wasn’t sleeping more than three hours per night, I was constantly agitated, quick to anger, emotionally simmering and ready to boil over.
As much as I don’t want to talk about politics right now, I have to - at least a little bit. Because the past four years in this country have nearly wrecked me. I have grappled with so much anger and hatred and disbelief. Every day felt like a new disaster, a new reason to be upset and fearful. I was furious most of the time, literally wanting to smash something (or someone) to pieces, while outwardly pretending through gritted teeth and clenched jaw to be fine, just fine. This state of being is completely against my nature. What I was feeling was the difficulty of consistently living with feelings that were so deeply against the grain of my personality.
During this time the word discernment kept popping up in my reading. I’d heard the word before, of course, but never really considered its true meaning or how it might be a valuable practice for my life. Ironic, right? The word literally means taking time to thoughtfully consider all aspects of a situation - an idea, a feeling, a plan, before taking action. To consciously choose, keeping ones beliefs, values, and needs in mind.
Discernment. It’s a beautiful word. It feels delicate yet strong at the same time. Which is exactly what it feels like to engage in it.
One sleepless night I took a hard look at what was happening in my life – the poor sleep, the anger and anxiety, the wine and social media fixation. I was seeing the effects in the lines on my face and thinning hair on my head. I was feeling them in my aching back and churning gut. I was coping with them in my unfocused and forgetful brain. I felt, as Carl Jung said, “thoroughly unprepared to step into the afternoon of life,” feeling an even greater since of urgency knowing I was really stepping into the evening of my life.
“We cannot live in the afternoon of life according to the program of life’s morning,” Jung continued. “For what was great in the morning will be little at evening, and what in the morning was true will by evening have become a lie.” That’s what I needed - a new program for the “evening” of life.
There was a sense of strength and empowerment in making that decision. In seeing clearly the ways I was sabotaging my happiness and my health. There was even more strength in beginning the delicate yet powerful process of discernment. Identifying the things that weren’t serving me while discovering new practices to help me live with a greater sense of peace, calm, emotional stability. Experimenting with putting those practices into place. Noticing how they helped or hindered.
Because I’m a bookish type, whenever I need to learn or do something new I turn to books – my “teachers.” In thinking about how to heal my heart, my mind, my body, I found myself immersed in the ideas of Sharon Salzberg, Pema Chodron, John O’Donohue, Mark Nepo. Because words matter in my life, I got a new notebook and started writing a lot about my reaction to this reading.
Because I’m also a practical type, I look for things I can DO. As Goethe wrote: “Whatever you need to do, begin it. Action has magic, grace, and power in it.” My usual “practice” has been to work off nervous energy by scrubbing a floor, baking a pie, scrolling mindlessly through social media.. But suddenly I felt called to do things completely the opposite of that restless activity – sit quietly on a cushion for 20 minutes every day; pause often for three deep breaths; walk slowly and pay attention to the sights and sounds around me. Doing these things began making me feel better.
As nice as all this sounded, there was something bothering me. Besides wanting to make positive changes in my own life, I felt called to do something, anything, to make the world around me better. My attempts at social activism over the past few years felt feeble and ineffectual. How was any of this going to make a different in the grander scheme of things?
One day in my reading I came upon this passage in a book by Sharon Salzberg: “Every step we take toward being kinder to ourselves, to greater peace and understanding for ourselves and our own lives, is a step toward greater peace for the world.”
In her book Welcoming the Unwelcome, Pema Chodron concurs. “Everything we do matters. If we go toward defensiveness and closing down, we add those elements to a planet that already suffers enough from such tendencies. Maintaining our own confidence and well-being benefits our family and our workplace and everyone we communicate with. Happiness is contagious.”
Here was what I needed: the notion that adopting healing practices for my own life could enable me to offer compassion and peace to a world in pain. The final step in the action plan for healing, health, and hope.
We’re all focused on preventing contagion these days, but happiness is certainly something we could agree on spreading around with abandon. That’s what I hope to do this year. I’m done with the negativity, the anger, the outrage. Just DONE. I want to move forward with hope and try to make things better.
Maybe you do too?
This post is the first in a series exploring my personal journey of healing, health, and hope. Writing things down is my way of making sense of them for myself and hopefully for others too. May you find something you need in these words.