White space
This afternoon, after having had only two hours of sleep last night, I walked into the local pharmacy and leaned on the counter with an air of desperation, announcing, “I have a cough that is keeping me awake all night. I heard from a friend who heard from her sister about some medicine I can take that stops the spasms. She says it is magic, but also that you probably won’t want to sell it to me. She thinks it starts with R.”
The pharmacist laughed out loud and said, “I know exactly what you’re talking about.” Then she handed me a bottle and added, “Welcome to the wonderful world of R—.”
So I am optimistic about actually getting some sleep tonight.
Ask me in the morning how that went.
I know why I have the persistent cough, it’s no great mystery. It’s because I’ve been working way too many hours and going out way too often and staying up way too late for either my or my body’s liking… all of which is wont to happen at this time of year.
This situation is somewhat ironic because, just last week, I shared my “12 Calm Days of Christmas” booklet online, which is all about building mindfulness, white space and self-care into the silly season. If only I’d listened to my own advice, I probably wouldn’t need to take anything that starts with R before I go to bed tonight.
Why are we so bad at listening to ourselves? Or to applying to our own lives what comes so naturally when it’s time to care for others? My mother always used to say, cleaners have the messiest houses. Librarians watch a lot of television. Teachers have the most unruly children. Or something to that effect.
(Which, come to think of it, doesn’t say a lot about me since I’m neither a cleaner, a librarian nor a teacher, but my house is a mess, Netflix is getting a solid workout, and my children have been known to show unruly tendencies. Sometimes. Bless them.)
But you take my point, don’t you? It’s a lot easier to give advice than follow it. Or to put it another way, when you do something all day, the last thing most of us want to do when we get home is to keep on doing that same thing for a new crowd.
Not that I walk around all day telling people to be mindful and look after themselves… but I do blather on about those things quite a bit, don’t I. I even wrote a feature article for Good magazine a couple of months ago, on the importance of building ‘white space’ into our days. Stop typing and just DO, Naomi.
So I have decided to make myself accountable to you. There are things in life that we can control, and things we can’t control. The fact of the matter is that this time of year brings a lot of social engagements and, despite my introverted soul wanting to shrink away from them, it would be rude (and possibly not healthy) to hermit myself completely. So here is what I will do:
Starting tomorrow morning, I will be obsessive about my nutrition. Life gets so exhausting and busy that it’s all too easy to fall into bad food habits because I’m too tired to cook, but right now my body needs extra TLC and so I’m going to fuel it properly. Even if the Christmas cake I baked is realllllly good. Even if ‘salad’ means just plonking a few chopped up veggies on a plate: there’s a whole lot more nutrition on that plate than in the nachos I order from around the corner.
Starting tonight, on the nights I’m NOT going out, I will be in bed, lights out, by 10pm. At the latest. That’s going to be a tricky one to stick to but I’m strict with my children, so it’s time to be strict with myself.
When we are out, I will be more conscious of the way the waiters top up my wine. I’ll stick to a three-drink maximum, no matter what.
This weekend, I will tidy my house. Not just the usual clean, a proper tidy up, where things get sorted and put away in their special places. I find a clean environment helps me clear my mind but, also, that the opposite is true: a cluttered environment leaves me feeling stressed and out of control.
OK I’m sure this list could grow, but I actually want to achieve these things, so I’m going to be kind to myself and stop there. Please feel free to hold me accountable, and ask me how I get along with these goals as we creep towards Christmas. It helps me to know you are there. (Just click on the title of this blog post to view it in your browser if you’d like to comment, or else feel free to email me directly).
And in the meantime, how are you going, dear friend? What does December look like for you? How do you cope with the pressures of this season?
ps. Clearly the photographs in this blog post are not from the weather we are experiencing here in Australia. Last week, it was 41 degrees Celsius, with high winds. (Then again, tonight it will get down to 8 with rain, so I guess you never can tell.) I snapped these photographs in Scotland almost a year ago - some of them from a moving car which is why you see a bit of blur - and right now they are just the clean, white, open spaces I need to see, in order to breathe.
