Friday, December 29, 2023

The Art Of Staying Busy

 


 

I’d have never made it as a pioneer.  I can barely bear to go shopping at Walmart for food, never mind go out into the frozen forest in search of something to hunt.  And, I am a busy person who is driven to keep busy but I could not have done all it takes to survive one winter’s day that my ancestors, the Viking women had to endure and get done. I used to be a multi-tasker.  Now. I can hardly stay focused on one task any more, so I end up making stations of ‘busyness” around the house and I move from one thing to another throughout the day… and night. 

I have met a woman who was me twenty years ago, thirty years ago, when it would take another mighty busy woman to task to try to keep up with me.   In fact, I volunteered to help her with several of her busy-making activities.  She asked me why I had helped her and I told her, “Because you are me a few decades ago and I could have used an assistant.”  I know how driven she is.  I remember.  My body is paying for it all now.  I have had to learn to disconnect from busyness as best I can and I, now, include a daily rest time in the mix of my busyness. And I seldom sleep longer than two-hour stints.  I get up in the night and roam around, trying to find something to do.    I am well aware that, at some point, I will reach exhaustion and exhaustion will slam me down and tell me, “I told you to slow down!”  I have.  I am forced to lie down, to rest, and look at the dark side of the moon to deal with what I am running from.  I, in my busyness, am disconnected from my emotions and I am hardly aware of myself, emotionally.  I have always been so.  The more stress, the harder I worked and my poor body was doing double time for it.

Work numbs the other three quadrants of my life.  I stay intellectually immersed through creativity…you will find me doing art, housework, anything to keep from thinking.  I stay emotionally distant.  I do not spend in depth time dealing with spirituality unless it is through the work of art, or creating.  I keep a working schedule while awake and I will stay awake for an hour or two between fitful sleeps I am driven to. I am living a habituation life.  I can no longer work as hard but I still stay busy which, in my warped sense of self, is not being “lazy” and, somewhere in there, I recognize the Puritan ideology that hard work keeps the devil away.   Of all things, why would it lead back to some religious ideology in me?  I need to find time to work some cognitive restructuring and explore all the reasons I allow work to override intellectual, emotional and spiritual aspects of Self.  My life is not in balance and my sleep patterns show it as well.  It is as if I live in short episodes.  Rest has become just another segment of my day.

Things need to change because I am not getting the healing that the body needs and is able to access best when one sleeps.  I am, it seems, full of nervous energy that causes me not to rest at night.  In order to restructure my thought processes and my subconscious worrying, I have to tae the time to consider the WHYS.

What is it that concerns me, at some deep level?  Am I worried something will happen and I will miss it?  What catastrophe could happen if I rested rather than kept awake and working during the hours of night I am awake and doing so? 

I am an aging workaholic.  I do not know what to do with quiet times.  As with all things, I need to begin to set some boundaries or myself. If I get up for other than to go to the bathroom at 3 am, I need to go back to bed and try to go back to sleep.  I have no doubt that I would because I sense I am in a perpetual state of exhaustion.  I am unable to build my energy through sleep and rest.  I have to find ways to retrain myself. 

It may sound simple to those who are not inflicted with inability to rest.  I justify that I get lots done as if that makes me “good”.  Therein lies to crux of it… being busy makes me good.  I learned that in my youth (“Cleanliness is next to godliness”, or some such, was taught to us, modeled for us, expected that we would live busy lives because of). Do I believe that I am going to reach some golden ticket to heaven if I work hard?  Does exhaustion really make me worthy?  This new year I have to turn this round.  Eating this elephant one small bite at a time, means that I will slowly transfer the negative thoughts about rest and sleep into healthier thoughts that rest gives me more energy and I can be more productive. I am reasoning with my psyche.   Being busy is not an art, it is a type of self-punishment for something I am not conscious of. 

Do you relate to any of this?  How are you going to turn negative thoughts about rest into positive ones? 

©Carol Desjarlais 12.29.23

 

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