A Watch Cannot Measure How Far the Heart Can Fall
I’ve had an Apple watch strapped to my wrist for the better part of a year. I wanted it for many reasons: it measured my steps, how many active calories I burned, how many hours I stood or exercised, my heart rate, my speed when running or biking, and I could even wear it while swimming laps in the pool. If I got my lap count wrong (say 50 laps, when I had only done 48), well then, I could correct that “error “right away. In short, I liked (ok, still like) how it measured my efforts over the course of each and every day. If I didn’t close my “Move” ring one day, then I knew I darn well better do it the next day (one of my yoga students asked me this week “who sets these rules?” and I answered, only half-jokingly, “well, God does!”)
I don’t think I’ve always measured things. When I was a young child, I spent long days wandering rolling pastures without thinking too much about time or how far I’d walked. Did I begin to measure when I was a teenager at an evangelical Bible camp (did my soul measure up?), or when I rowed competitively (did I weigh too much?), or when I was in university (if I failed to get As, would the universe rain down its acid of inevitable and irrevocable failure?)? In short, what could I punish myself for? (Here are some podcast pearls of wisdom on doing a lot of these things out of self-punishment.)
This is my watch at 4 pm today. Given I’m at a writing retreat, I did not put it on today, which, I’ll admit it, discombobulates me.
What Will I Have Left?
Part of this penchant for accounting likely has to do with a personality trait of mine, which, according to Gretchen Rueben’s Four Tendencies Framework , is the Upholder. This means that if I say I’m going to run 10 kilometres, I must run 10 kilometres and not 9.98.
But it also runs a little deeper. If I track my food precisely, I can control my weight and how people see me. If I make this many dollars, I will feel secure. If the dishwasher is loaded and unloaded in exactly the right way, the house will not fall down into a pile of broken bricks and splintered floor boards around me. It is funny and ridiculous, and I can sometimes roll my eyes at it, but really, it is because I am deeply, terribly afraid of losing control and whatever the consequences of this loss might be.
And I have been deeply, terribly afraid of what the loss of all this tracking and doing might leave me with.
Things Actually Fall Apart, and I’m Too Busy On My Phone to Realize It
Well, of course, despite all this calculating and worrying and holding things so, so tight, when disaster was actually striking, when things were actually falling apart, I wouldn’t/couldn’t even recognise it. From my hospital bed, I was too busy on my phone trying to control who would look after my editing students, trying to find subs for my yoga classes, letting my co-volunteer at the school’s breakfast club know that I would not make it in that week. I was updating Facebook and finishing reading a novel.
What a manageable mini-lark this all was! In other words, I was in absolute denial that I actually had no control over my body at this point and that to live without a major organ exploding, I had to cede all of that control into the hands of very well-trained professionals in a space-ship like room full of sterile equipment, who would put me to sleep and remove said organ without me even feeling it (praise be).
The Best Damn Recoverer
At that point, I thought I would be fine. I was proud of how fit and healthy I was, which made the risk of complication lower and the ease of recovery, I thought, higher. I would, in fact, be the best damn recoverer known to humankind. Indeed, I came home from the hospital at 9:30 am, seven hours after surgery, and by 10 am, I was clearing up email (because who needs to rest or sit with anything?)
Ah, hubris. In fact a day after surgery, I woke up to pain, which escalated in the night. It came in waves that felt like they were sending shrapnel through my stomach and pelvic floor. It went on and on and on, so intense I couldn’t pee, or stand, or do anything but cry. I spent a much more horrible day in the emergency room. There was no texting or reading or coping, just being in pain in a seething room of others also in pain (though I did listen to Jon Kabat Zinn’s Body Scan Meditation over and over again, which I think helped just as much as the pain drugs, and more for my state of mind). Then I went home and spent several more days not able to walk or lie down or sit or sleep without those pain waves.
In that time frame, the unknowing was almost worse than the pain. What was causing it? Would it last forever? Was I crazy? Who was I if I was not working, moving, answering texts and emails and checking Facebook?
In that time, I realized I had to shut it all down. The computer. The phone. The “I am strong and tough” persona. I could not truly, deeply rest with the digital space calling me. I had to tell people “I am not ok” and rely on their true goodness. I had to ask for help (note: had to. Why can’t we just allow ourselves and other people the giving and receiving of help?). I had to lie on the couch and watch the light of winter blanket the back yard and the chickadees go on in the face of it. I had to sit with the Big. I. Don’t. Know. And I hated it.
The Best Damn Recoverer (Reprise)
In the end, after a few more days, a CT confirmed nothing was internally wrong, and that the pain turned out to be from damage to muscles and nerves, who were quite insulted by the whole scenario (no one tells you a very high percentage of post-operative patients experience nerve pain).
A ha! I thought. I know how to work with this; I am a yoga teacher who has taken courses on how the mind works with pain! I have played for my students Richard Miller’s Yoga Nidra on pain recording! I will be up and running (literally) in no time! I should be ok — it’s just muscle and nerve pain, and the surgeon doesn’t know why this has happened, so it’s not real pain! I should be able to return to my pre-surgical life in the prescribed 4-6 weeks. This experience should not be happening to me, so I’m going to ignore it and do all the things anyway!
Well, it turns out my body has its own timeline. True, I’ve had some good days, and even a week where it felt like my muscles were healing, and in response I pushed it, but didn’t even know I was pushing it until hours after. Then, yesterday, I turned the wrong way or something (I don’t even know what I did), and my Friendly Insulted Psoas started spasming in a new place, in the upper half and around my back, waking me up in the night, sometimes taking my breath away, sometimes hurting to actually breathe.
Have I learned a Wise Lesson in all of this? I wish I could say I truly understood in the depths of my being Pema Chodron-like truths about the ground always shifting beneath us and that certainty is not in fact certainty. Pre-surgery, I really thought I knew this stuff, talked about it in my yoga classes, thought I was chill with the overall concept of shifting ground.
But it turns out I don’t really know this stuff. I fight this stuff. My mind throws tantrums into the universal void that keeps hitting me back with an asteroid named Slow. The. Fuck. Down.
A List Without Answers
What do I know? What can I share? I don’t have final answers, only this list, only these things I am working through and don’t have a pat ending for, a list I would be happy to have you add to:
Things fall apart.
Sometimes we will be in the void without answers and without knowing if we will make it out.
As one of my wonderful yoga students said, sometimes all we can do, and the best thing to do is name it: “This is suffering.”
In order to rest, we must Shut It All Down. We must shut down the measuring and the doing, even if everything in our minds and cultures tells us we can’t possibly. We must dwell in stillness even if it scares us because if we don’t, the universe will make that choice for us, and it will not be pretty or comfortable or “safe.”
The only person who can make me rest is me. The only person who can make you rest is you. But we can bring each other cups of tea and muffins and allow for that rest even if it goddamn kills us.
We must reach out in the dark for other people. Other people will open their arms.
We must learn these lessons again and again and again.
PS
My Ongoing Time of Trial has dragged my writing life back into the picture, even if I am kicking and screaming at it (Fuck you, creativity!!) For that, I am happy, and hoping to write more regularly here. Also, I probably won’t always use so many expletives. Maybe.