Effort and its opposites
I've had this thing with my back lately. The thing is: it hurts. Not joint or disk pain, just the muscles, sore and tight in a way that mostly impact my life by being annoying. I sit at my desk and am distracted by the pain. Irked. Irritated.
There's almost nothing I love more than solving a problem, except maybe overpreparing for an insignificant event, but what's thwarting about this particular problem is its possible solutions seem to be opposites. Is the solution more exercise, movement and strengthening? Or is this muscle soreness from overwork, do I need to go easier or take a break? Effort or rest? Can't do both at once!
And this isn't a metaphor but it is a microcosm, for what feels like just about everything these days, or at least the everything that finds its way into my morning pages, ripe for rumination. Do I need to push myself or relax more? Am I being lazy or too hard on myself? I'm desperate for a break but maybe I'd feel better if I accomplished more. It's the endless back-and-forth that leaves me a pile of mush on the couch at 8pm, looking at my phone with a basketball game on in the background, not relaxing or really enjoying myself, just mush.
The solution, I realized, has to be off the axis of the push/relax binary, a third option. What's outside that either-or, neither pushing harder nor swearing off work? Easy work? Gentle movement? Some combination of work and caretaking—that's when I realized, what I was describing was recovery. Rest that isn't the opposite of work but is its complement. Work that isn't taking away from rest but making room for it, giving the rest a job.
I know I didn't invent recovery, I'm even borrowing the word from the lexicon of athletics, specifically weightlifting, I think. Weightlifting being the best exercise I ever did, so good it was worth getting up for 6am classes, the compound movements that approached choreography, the pure pleasure of flinging something very heavy up over your head, and then holding it there. I was sore a lot from that class, of course, and the difference between that pain and this one is probably my tolerance, it was easier to be sore when I didn't have a toddler or a pandemic or whatever. But the work was also clearly harder, so maybe the pain made more sense? I'm still not sure if today's pain is from work or poor posture or my body just being kind of old. But that gets me back in the loop again: Do I need to push my body more or less? And so I step off that track, and focus on recovery.
For my body that means stretching, baths, the various knot-pummeling technologies we've collected in the house (knock-off theragun, lacrosse ball, etc), and specifically thinking about these things as recovery, helping my body feel better after whatever's been hard, whether that's exercise or sitting or, maybe this is it, lifting a thirty-pound toddler several times a day.
For the rest of me, it means thinking about rest as something other than mush-time. What would that time look like if I didn't shut down but recovered? What does the rest of me, the non-corporeal me, need?
I keep coming back to artist dates, honestly, the counterpoint in The Artist's Way to morning pages. Morning pages are the daily (or whatever) brain-barf journaling, three pages of longhand of whatever's on your mind that shows you what's on your mind and helps you practice generating without getting caught up on editing or thinking about if it's good. Ungunking the brain pipes, I like to call it. But that's not the only regular practice the book prescribes: You're also supposed to go on a weekly artist date, a two-hour solo excursion where you replenish your stores of artistic inspiration. It can be explicitly artsy—go to a museum, see a dance performance—or less narrowly conceived than that. Especially during the pandemic (or times of financial constraint) you have to get creative. How can you spend two hours receiving instead of creating? What refills your artistic well? A walk in the woods, a candlelit bath (maybe that one shouldn't be two hours long), reading poetry with a mug of your favorite tea by your side. It all gets very cozy and hygge when you're trying to do it for cheap and/or socially distanced.
I just realized, this morning pages/artist date pair tracks perfectly to Buddhist meditation, where you alternate mindfulness and lovingkindness (or mettabhavna) meditations, because if you're only developing your awareness, you honestly just get too raw. Cultivating lovingkindness leads you to do good in the world, sure, but it's also because your mindful soul needs the balm.
I mean, if instead of trying to do an artist date once a week (with what free time!?!?!?!?!?!?!!??!) I just sat and did 20 minutes of mettabhavna a few days a week, that would probably be really good. In an ideal world we'd get to do both, go soak up some art and spend some time cultivating lovingkindness toward ourselves and others. But this is not an ideal world, and I know how privileged I am to even get to consider any of this. (That really derails my worries—I'm stressed about not being able to do morning pages and meditate and go to a museum? Woe!)
I feel like I've gone off-track (which is why morning pages are precious, there is no off-track, you just follow your stupid weird brain wherever it wants to go, a precious skill!), but the point is: Recovery. And how it's not the same thing as rest, especially not the mushy splat-rest of the toddler parent in the pandemic. Or the toddler parent ever. Or anyone in the pandemic. Maybe the problem is looking at our phones, not restful except when it is, when the instagram stories are really good? Maybe the problem is me trying to fix every problem, to hack it with reframes and solutions instead of accepting that right now this is what life is. What would the Buddha have to say about that?
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