Beauty on the Backroads

Stories of grace for life's unexpected turns

Lisa

This year will be different

It’s a third of the way through January, and I already feel like I’m doing it wrong. Doing what wrong, I’m not sure. It’s just that I have this sense that I’m somehow squandering the new year. That a new start should feel more productive, more monumental. While I appreciate the opportunity for renewal that comes with the start of a new year, I kind of hate all the pressure that tags along. We’re “supposed to” dream big and plan and set goals, none of which are bad things, but how can any one day of the year hold that much expectation?

Photo by Glen Carrie on Unsplash

If I’ve learned anything over the years it’s that the planning, the dreaming, the goal-setting is a constant process of re-evaluation. We can make our plans, dream our dreams and set our goals, but life often has other plans for us and if we don’t hold those things loosely, we can easily convince ourselves we’ve failed if we don’t achieve what we set out to do at the beginning of the year.

It’s the bigness of the dreams, goals and plans that bothers me right now. A dream, goal or plan doesn’t have to be big to be good.

—

I spent half of last year dealing with an ovarian cyst. Between the discovery of it, the surgery to remove it and the recovery from surgery, it was five months, not all of it active, but the issue was looming in the background. In the fall, before surgery, my health took a scary turn–high blood pressure and extreme anxiety. I had been taking on too much and not taking care of myself.

Photo by Robert Bye on Unsplash

I was squeezing extra work–writing, reading–into the margins of my day. I felt really productive most days, but all that constant working was taking a toll on my body. The month of recovery after my surgery left me with quite a shock. I couldn’t do all the things I normally could do. I rested. I read. I watched shows and movies.

And I thought about what needed to change for this year. What settled in my soul is a hard statement to put into words.

The truth is: I want to do less this year.

(There. I said it. And I survived. Even now, though, I want to erase it.)

Do less? Who wants to do less? Who makes that their goal?

I am fully aware that we live in a world where more is the word that grabs our attention. Every advertisement convinces us we need more of this or that. More savings. More stuff. More money. More, more, more.

I’ve been wrestling with this plan to do less for months, and I’m still not completely comfortable with it. Will people think I’m lazy if I say I want to scale back and do less? Will I appear apathetic or uncaring when I say “no” to some things?

Honestly, I don’t care what people think about this plan. I have no proof, but I think this elusive quest for more is killing us, and I’m over it.

I didn’t know how much I needed the break from everything until I was on medical leave, and it’s almost embarrassing that it took a medical reason to force my rest. The pace of life slowed way down for me in November, and I tried hard not to let it ramp up again in December. Fortunately for me, my body wouldn’t allow me to jump back in to life as it was before the surgery, so I had to ease into it.

Now it’s January and the pressure to “get back to normal” is creeping back in. But I don’t want to go back to normal. Not the normal that had me sobbing in two doctors’ offices with terrifying blood pressure numbers and prescription anxiety medication in my hands.

Friends, that’s not normal. It can’t be. (Please don’t hear me say that anxiety is not normal or that it’s somehow wrong to take medication. That’s not what I’m saying, not at all.)

As much as I might want to do more, this year, I’m focusing on doing less.

—

You might know that I choose a word every year–something to center my life on for the year, a word that becomes my focus.

Last year’s word was “intention.” It was a good word, a good plan for the year, forcing me to think ahead about some things and not just drift through my life. I didn’t write much specifically about that word, but I do feel like it changed me and helped me grow throughout the year.

For this year, I pondered a couple of words that went along with the theme of less doing, more being, words like rest and return, but the one that keeps speaking to my soul is “abide.”

It’s a bit archaic, the meaning I’m going for. It’s the idea of living or dwelling with. It’s not quite the opposite of intention, although it feels a little like it is. I don’t mean to accept whatever comes my way or tolerate bad behavior or anything like that. I just need to reconnect with this inner sense of being.

Apart from what I do and produce in this life, I want to abide as who I am at my core. And to do that, I have to strip off all the expectations that what I do, what I produce, makes me who I am.

It is no small task.

One way I’ve started implementing the idea of abiding is by letting the morning hours be leisurely. Last year, I was waking up around 5:30 a.m. trying to write or otherwise do creative work for an hour or so before I felt everyone had to start getting ready for work and school. A lot of mornings, I would be frustrated because my kids wake up early, and I wanted to protect that hour. I did get some things done, but I always felt a bit rushed in the morning.

Since my health issues, I reformed the morning hours. I still wake up around 5:30 a.m. but the first little bit is for spiritual practices. I listen to a short prayer program called Pray As You Go, and I read the daily passages offered in the Book of Common Prayer. These are things I had abandoned in favor of productivity last year, and while I don’t hold any expectation for these practices (i.e. if I start my day with prayer and Bible reading, the rest of the day will go well!), they do help me fight the urge to do.

When I finish those two practices, I make coffee and breakfast. I read for leisure. And then I start getting ready for work. It’s a rhythm that’s working for me right now, and I do feel better able to start the day on a more centered note.

—

The temptation, with a word like “abide,” will be to let some things slide. I am letting go of some things this year, but my hope is to create more space for the things I feel are more important. For example, I’m planning to take one afternoon/evening a month to leave work and head to a coffee shop and focus on my writing until I’m ready to come home. I will sacrifice some family time to do this, but if I want to accomplish my writing goals, I have to.

In other ways, I’m starting over. Like with running. I’m back to the plan I used when I first started running, if only to ease my body back into the habit. My muscles remember, though, and as badly as I want to just run and keep running, I’m forcing myself to stick to the running and walking plan for now. Last year, I ran five 5k races which was not something I planned to do. But I consider it a great accomplishment. Last year, I wanted to try a 4-mile race for the first time, but my husband got sick and I couldn’t follow through with that.

This year, I want to run a half-marathon with my husband–13 miles to celebrate 13 years of marriage. This is a goal that terrifies me, especially since I’m practically starting over with running. Maybe that doesn’t sound like it fits with the “do less” plan. It is probably the biggest goal I have this year, and it will take discipline and focus. I will have to do less of other things to stick to my training plan.

—

Forward. Forward. Forward. 

It’s the way we’re always told to be moving. To grow is to advance, and I don’t think it’s always wrong, but I don’t think we give enough credit to the idea of circling back. Of returning. Of starting again. Sometimes we need to return to the places we’ve been, to walk a circle instead of a straight line, to revisit a place, physical or mental or spiritual, that we think we’ve moved on from. And we need to see it as part of the process, instead of as negative progress or regression.

If you find yourself in a place of returning, a place of circling, a place of starting over, please know that you’re not doing it wrong. More isn’t always better. Forward isn’t always the best direction. Growth and change can happen when you’re standing still (just ask the trees). It can happen when the world is cold and dark (just ask the seeds planted in spring).

Whatever you choose to focus on this year, may it bring you joy and peace.

These past few weeks

When my doctor first told me I’d be off work for at least four weeks, I was devastated, and it wasn’t just the thought of not having a paycheck for a month. It was all the other stuff I wasn’t going to be able to do. Things like driving or helping with housework. I briefly had visions of dedicating this time to writing but the reality of healing and recovering from surgery was more intense than I expected.

I have not been able to put together words like I had hoped. Sitting down to write something, anything has felt like too much work, even when I’ve had the smallest of desires.

These past few weeks have not been a waste, though. I’m slowly starting to see that. Aside from the physical healing of my body, these weeks have shown me some things about myself. 

Like, how far I’ve come. And how far I still have to go.

Photo by Olivier Guillard on Unsplash

—

Two years ago, I sat on a couch in our friends’ living room celebrating Thanksgiving by sobbing. The source of my sorrow was the prospect of getting a job. At that time, it had been 10 years since I’d done anything outside of the house, and I was afraid of all I would lose by giving up hours a day to something else even with the promise that those hours would come with a regular paycheck.

These past few weeks I have felt (heard?) the echoes of those days before I stepped out of what was comfortable into something that was ultimately better than I could have imagined. I have both embraced and resisted the hours stretching before me with nothing scheduled. In the first few days, those hours were spent in bed, reading, watching Netflix, listening to the world that is my household go on without me. I rested and slept, took medicine every few hours.

I cried. A lot.

My perceived helplessness and the effect it had on my family saddened me. I felt guilty for being so incapable of even the smallest of chores. I had small measures of hope that every day would get better, that my body would return to its normal, but fear lurked in the shadows. What if it was always going to be like this?

Photo by Dan Meyers on Unsplash

I reached a low point as I wandered around the house for the umpteenth day wearing pajama pants with nothing on the agenda except the choice between a Netflix binge, reading, and a jigsaw puzzle. On this day, it was easiest to choose the Netflix binge because it meant I didn’t have to move much from the couch. And while we were overwhelmed with food from caring friends, almost everyone brought dessert with the meal which meant there were a lot of sweets in the house and me, unsupervised.

I think I’ve gained 10 pounds since I’ve been home recovering, partly because of the desserts and partly because taking a walk has been a scary prospect. I haven’t begun to think about what returning to running will look like.

The pajama pants, the inactivity, the too-many-sweets. These are the echoes of my former life, and in the last two years, I’ve worked hard to reverse what were for me some negative habits. A month at home recovering from surgery has felt like the largest of setbacks.

But the experience of those two years is what keeps me from total despair.

I know how my life can be different.

—

Photo by Caleb Woods on Unsplash

Two years ago, I had lost myself. Or maybe I was hidden from myself. The past two years have been a gradual act of discovery, of becoming a person I didn’t even know could exist in my body. I sensed the change. Others could see it. The past two years have been some of the most fulfilling and purposeful of my entire life.

And these past few weeks, I’ve worried that I’m losing myself again. It is too easy to slide into old habits and patterns when there is little to no structure to my days. To force myself out of the house, off the couch with no outside force acting on me.

But this is not the same thing, I tell myself. This is not a season without end. I might have to start over, in some ways, but I haven’t lost everything I gained in the last two years. The me that I’m becoming is still there, even if she’s slumbering for a bit.

All is not lost.

—

And yet I wonder: What do I have to show for all this time off?

I joked about trying to write a novel for National Novel Writing Month since I had an unexpected month of “free” time, but I knew early on that wasn’t going to happen. What I’ve learned about myself in the past few years is an unstructured day is not conducive to writing for me. I get more writing done when I have to squeeze it into smaller chunks of my day. At least, that’s how it works for now, while I’m still learning and developing my skills.

Photo by Andreas Klassen on Unsplash

What these past few weeks have taught me is I’m addicted to productivity. My worth is equal to what I can or cannot do instead of in who I am as a person. I’ve felt like a burden as my husband and kids go to work and school and then come home to take care of me and the house. I have felt needy and vulnerable–because I am–as friends have dropped off meals and stepped in to help with transportation and care for the kids. I had no idea how independent and self-sufficient I had become until I had to be utterly dependent on others.

I measure my days by what I accomplish, so when I look at these past few weeks and wonder what I have to show for it, I try to list the things I’ve done: the books I’ve read, the Netflix shows I’ve watched, the crossword puzzles completed, the progress on learning Spanish via Duolingo, the minimal amounts of housework I’ve been able to do.

What do I have to show for this time?

A healed (healing?) body.

It is enough.

I am enough.

—

One of the books I finished these past few weeks is Glorious Weakness: Discovering God in All We Lack by Alia Joy. I had started it before my surgery and found it an appropriate companion on my healing journey.

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These thoughts, in particular, are the ones I can’t let go of:

“I am a whole version of me even when I am broken or weak or sick.” (p. 172)

And,

“The world expects you to grow forward, march down a line. Do more, be more, have more. Then you will see the hand of God and his blessings. … But God is not about upward mobility so much as inward expansion.” (p. 220-221)

I am confronting my need to do all the things. These past few weeks, when I’ve been unable to do much more than live, breathe, eat and heal, the world has spun on without me. My kids have done housework. Or housework has gone undone. My husband has shared the load. I have asked for help and not been rejected. I have not “produced” and I am still a valuable part of my world.

So.

What does this mean when things go back to “normal”? I’m still a week away from what I hope will be my return to work, and I can already sense the pressure to do, do, do.

The only antidote I can think of is to be, be, be.

This, I believe, will be my focus in the year to come. When I choose a word to guide my year, it will have less to do with achievement and more to do with the inner work of becoming.

The pressure to produce will be hard to resist. I know it will be a struggle.

—

I did not ask for these past few weeks. In all honesty, I did not want them. I wanted life to go on as it had. (Don’t I always?)

Rarely do I recognize this kind of thing as a gift from the start, but it has been a gift, even when it’s been hard.

Life will return to some sort of normal soon. My hope is that I won’t forget all that I’ve learned these past few weeks.

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