We Work With What We Wake Up With
I’m a bean counter by nature. I loved all of my stats classes in college and writing complex macros in Excel was something I use to do for fun when I worked in higher education. Math just never lets you down. Or so it seemed. You could count on the numbers to tell you the truth, once you could juggle the books with the best of them and see through the sheer veneer of budget and planning and how people manipulate the charts to make it appear in their favor.
Nonetheless, I liked scattergrams and projection analysis. So it was no small wonder that I have spent the better part of my healing journey collecting data in order to determine if I was making any real progress. At times when I was very ill and bedridden, I use to use a stop watch to count how long I could sit up in bed, unsupported by pillows. Then I would count the number of steps I could walk until I could finally make it to the mailbox. Later in life, when my world began to shrink and I no longer went for long drives … I would make marks on a map of our neighborhood to show places that I had been, so that I would push myself to go farther and farther out of what I thought was my comfort zone.
What I learned from all of my pencil pushing … was simple common sense. When I felt better .. I could do more. And when I didn’t feel well .. I did less. Despite my scientific nature, there was no rhyme or reason of when I could make it to my next “goal” … sometimes things happened and sometimes they just didn’t. Even though my efforts were the same or greater. The results simply did not correlate with my best of intentions.
You would think by now .. I would have given up completely on trying to find solid ground under the thin ice of my micromanagement. But in truth, the desire to see progress … to believe things can and ARE getting better … is so much a part of who I am (human nature) that I still find myself falling into the data trap every now and Zen.
I wrote a rather long blog about my missing mother, this past mother’s day. It was at the same time my database back-end corrupted and I lost (temporarily) those seven years of my work …. that I decided to look upon it as a sign that I could move forward without rehashing my pain surrounding my mother’s choice to not be part of our lives. However it was in that mental diatribe when her values about “being autonomous” and some sense of sovereignty kept hitting me over the head like a hard wood 2×4. Because for Mom, it was always about being able to TAKE CARE OF YOURSELF. And alas, I do a piss-ant poor job of that. I have a cadre of people around me at all times. Much of the time, I am too sick to get up and do even simple things during the day. But more to the point, I find it comforting to not be alone in this illness. My body does too many unpleasant and unbidden things throughout the day and I find it difficult to manage my wits about me without their help.
However, Mom’s words still echo in my past-middle-aged brain … and I realize in her eyes (and my own conditioned mind) if I am not taking care of myself, if I am dependent on anyone, than I am not FREE. So this week, I was making an effort to not ask for help. Besides the “little things” like hot packs or glasses of coconut water … if my body flared, I made a point of getting up and going to sit by myself somewhere until it passed.
More than a week went by … (9 days, and 14 hours, but who is counting?) and I was doing a smash up job of it. Mom would be proud! Then last night, I woke up at 5:00 a.m. and felt the dsyautonomic meet and greet of the start of a bad day. I stumbled in the dark to the kitchen to heat up a hot pack for myself and while I was waiting the 90 seconds I watched myself knock on my 20 year old’s door. Dan wasn’t alarmed. It was just me, and I flair all the time. He just turned on the light and sat up as I chatted a bit with him until I felt settled enough to go back to bed.
I spent the rest of the morning beating myself up for asking for help. After all, it had been nine days (and fourteen hours) since I imposed upon anyone. Good for me, right?
When the redneck sage woke up, I told him that I had had a rough morning and after he chastised me for not waking him up he said very firm …
“You ain’t gonna do that no more. You hear me? You ain’t gonna bean count about nuttin. You know that. We’ve been through this before. It doesn’t help you. It don’t make you stronger, it just keeps you focused on all this stuff you can’t do instead of what things you CAN do. Each day when you wake up, you get to do what you CAN DO. And that’s it. You don’t worry about trying to make some make believe goal. You don’t gotta think about going further than you did before. It don’t work like that. Its never worked like that for you.”
With soft tears falling slowly down my cheeks I looked up at him “How will I know if I’m getting better?”
“You don’t ever have to think about getting better. You just DO today. This is all you got. You hear me? You ain’t gonna do this countin’ thing no more.”
“But its what my mind does,” I said with wet cheeks.
“Not anymore … ” he said then quickly added, “Cause you’re CURED!”
And at that . . . we both dissolved in a flood of laughter.
Its hard to let go of life long patterns. We have such an investment in who we think we are .. or more at point who we think we should be. Who are parents want us to be and how we think society will judge us. So we hold on … even when some things aren’t working for us. Because to NOT have a plan seems more hopeless than abandoning even our ineffective planning strategies. But in my practice, it has always been about letting go. Touching whatever it is lightly as we greet and acknowledge it .. and then letting it go, because we know that everything changes. Some days it will feel like we are walking up hill, while other times we’ll feel carried on a wave of ease and simplicity. But everyday, all we can bring to the table is what we have in that moment. We work with what we wake up with. And that’s more than enough to take us the next step into uncharted skies.
