BRB, transforming

It’s been quite a year. We’ve been pushed well outside our well-trodden grooves and flung way out of our comfort zones. We’ve learned how to really wash our hands and how to really stay put. We’ve rearranged cupboards, drawers, goals, relationships and how we navigate all those places. 2020 stripped us right down to the bones and the basics, the architecture and the infrastructure of our lives.

In this time of retreat, we’ve taken stock of the lives we built (and sometimes, of what remains of those old lives), and a few things emerged with complete and utter clarity: Life is not infinite. People and connection are important. We need much less stuff than we thought we did. There is nothing quite as important as being well.

Part of the beauty of lockdown was the forced slowness, as much as it did grate for those of us who were used to living at top speed. That slowdown offered a glimpse (a memory, even) of the past. A remembrance of quiet afternoons, of reading for hours, and of living intensely in the moment. Those chunks of time quietly dismantled walls I’d erected in my own memory and I found myself remembering what life once was like. I found myself writing long paragraphs for no reason at all, and for no eyes but my own. “All of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone,” Blaise Pascal mused in the 17th century. Well, 2020 showed us.

BIG SHIFT’S COMING

My lessons? The biggest one’s been a move from constantly pushing to really understanding the importance of rest and slowness. I’ve heard it so much, so often, from trainers and from physiotherapists and from articles and podcasts and every other resource I depend on, but I never managed to set that load down: that sense of needing to do more, push harder, do one more class, never miss a session, wake up earlier and earlier to squeeze in just one more practice… it took a pandemic and half a year for me to take baby steps toward understanding the dynamic between push and pull, of the need to pull back for rest and restoration, but also to build momentum for the push when that’s what my mind and body need. There is so much pleasure in the push, in getting shit done, in making leaps and bounds in projects and work, in a really sweaty movement session where you’re in the flow…. but none of that push is possible without the pullback.

It’s a process and a process that is personal.

I can’t tell you if you’re being lazy, or if you’re listening to your body when it says, ‘I need rest.’ Only you can know, and it takes time to get there. I pushed and I pushed and I pushed: multiple classes a day coupled with a pretty nutty workload and a desire to do independent creative work, and that’s without even mentioning my relationships and making time for connection. It took injuries, growing fatigue and a creeping sense of creeping burnout for me to listen to my body and rest, and I fucking struggled with every second of it.

“Feeling well shouldn’t be a luxury, and it cannot be prescriptive”

Taking time off felt like time-wasting. When I dislocated my knee I was preoccupied less with my healing and recovery, and more with, ‘but when can I get back to working out?’ A missed workout felt like a failure, and I hate that every cliche is true on this front (mostly because I know that reading this will have as little impact on you as it did on me every time I read it): it took building meditation into my day with the same discipline that I bring to my work and workouts to understand when pushing through a mental block would energise, versus hearing when my body asked for slowness and stretching and gentle restorative movement, or possibly no movement at all.

I signed up for a course in April that allowed me to approach daily meditation like a group class (of course), and so that’s how it went. ‘Ugh, I really don’t feel like,’ but doing it anyway. Feeling like I wanted to be anywhere but there, but doing it anyway. Three minutes feeling like an eternity but sitting there through it anyway. What happened? Well, nothing, at first. I’m pretty certain you’ve all meditated at some point and know that feeling. But then, little things. Mindset shifts. A sense that perhaps I was approaching the same issues differently. I signed up for that course again in July. And then I signed up again in August, and now it is habit. It’s moved from me dragging myself through the prescribed sequence to picking and choosing the aspects that feel good to me. I’ve learned that splitting it up into chunks helps me stick with it. I do five three-minute chunks because that’s doable. I play music for some of the chunks. I rearrange the sequence sometimes. Sometimes I just do three chunks instead of all five. Sometimes I play a mantra and put my legs up against the wall. I’ve found ways to make it pleasure instead of a slog, and follow my body to wherever it takes me. I feel better for it.

Here’s the thing though, I can’t do that for you. I can’t tell you whether you like active meditations or whether you’re a go-deep-for-an-hour sort of person. I can’t tell you if you like pilates and yoga and hate HIIT or whether it’s the other way around. I can’t tell you if dairy makes you bloat, and if you prefer cooked foods to crunchy greens. Only you can do that for you.

Feeling well shouldn’t be a luxury, and it cannot be prescriptive, because health is personal. Health, vitality and pleasure should be accessible to us all. Self-care, self-soothing, meditation and resilience are essential skills, in work and in life. It takes access to resources, a repository of recommendations and practices, and the knowledge that you have the freedom to pick and choose from it all until you cobble together what works for you, that day, that month, that season.

The Tonic Toolbox is coming March 2021.