Have you ever experienced something popping up over and over again, trying to get your attention to let you know that something needs to change?
For me, the lesson I can’t seem to learn is to slow down.
First, I’d say, it was my body. For the last 2-4 years I have experienced migraines for multiple days complete with nausea and dizziness. Like, if I tilt my head to the right, the room would give a little swoop! It turns out, you can have a TMJ disorder* so badly, you can give yourself migraines. (0/10. Would not recommend.)
Last year, there was the watering of the plants.
This month it was picking cherries.
Last week it was tackling a hike like I was being chased by a pack of wild dogs. (Or perhaps a pack of worries and anxieties disguised as wild dogs?)
When, exactly, will I heed this lesson and stop barreling through life? Because other than TMJ, all of these things were things I chose to do.
No one made me end up with 20 (or so…) houseplants but there I was – basically throwing water at my houseplants, like it was their fault that I forgot to water them on Moisture Monday until 11PM at night.
No one said go spend a couple of hours every year in an orchard, picking sour cherries! But there I was, trying to pull as many stems off the tree at one time as I could, popping cherries off of said stems and losing them to the ground.
And that hike? Had I kept going at the pace I started with, besides probably passing out from being out of shape, I would have missed 5 mushrooms I’d never seen before!
In my rush to get things done, I miss out on the process part of things. The process is part of it, my friends. Outcomes, goals – whatever you’d like to call them – are lovely. I encourage them and wholeheartedly cheer you on! But whether you are writing a book, starting a business, or learning to play the guitar, the final outcome is the smallest part of what you chose to do.
I have 2 friends who have run half- and full-marathons. They get out the training calendar, gradually adding time and distance to their runs over a long span of weeks. And then there is running of the marathon itself – 26 miles of it! Crossing the line and saying you did it is awesome but brief. I believe they actually enjoy the training leading up to it, or, at the very least, enjoy it enough to get through the hard parts (which I imagine includes some early mornings, side cramps, and shin splints).
I say actually because I will likely not be running a marathon. I don’t like running. (Unless I’m running for towels to mop up spilled water on my wood floors from throwing water at my plants – oooo, then watch me sprint!)
And yes, a marathon is a more involved example of process, but even the smaller, more ordinary aspects of life have a process associated with them. Caring for those lovely plants, for example. That is a process.
If I want to sit in the living room with my cup of coffee in the morning and enjoy my plants in a green, healthy state, I have to keep them alive! This means watering them with some regularity, snipping dying leaves, repotting or trimming them back when they get too big for their britches, and maybe tossing some fertilizer their way now and again.
Each of those pieces of the process take time. I often feel that I need to be in a hurry, to get to the next thing as quickly as possible which means I’m not fully present to the task I am doing in that moment.
When I go about things this way, everything feels like a chore. Almost as if the thing that I chose to do is interrupting my life when, in reality, that thing I chose to do IS my life. As the quote says –
How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives. What we do with this hour, and that one, is what we are doing. – Annie Dillard
