Detox the Busy
I tricked my body into thinking the sound of one thousand engines running was the warm whir of the womb.
I told my system this pulse of the blood in my ears was a heartbeat’s music, the constant voice babble inside my head, a mother’s lullaby.
Before cancer, my pace had been quickening to runaway train status.
I had a Come-To-Jesus about it when I opened my gratitude journal after a fight with Michael and saw we’d had the exact same fight exactly one year ago. No more. I refuse to be writing down the same fight one year from now.
I made a short list:
no numbing
sound healing for Michael
I work one less day a week
we have a weekly date outside at the Reservoir, to laugh, not talk.
I copied down these words from Clarissa Pinkola Estes:
“the modern woman is a blur of activity. She is pressured to be all things to all people. The old knowing is long overdue. We’ve been EXTINCTING THE INSTINCTUAL.”
When suffering happens, may I suggest that it is not only a profound disruption to our way of life but a FORCED DETOX of our way of life?
Many of us are addicted to the movement, the rush we get when we feel indispensable, when things absolutely HAVE to get done.
I find myself still doing it, even this morning, looking at some papers I need to sign (eventually) and thinking, “Oh my god, I should have DONE that already! How am I going to have time to do that today along....with....everything....else.”
The thought trails off.
There is no “everything else” anymore.
There is: make food. Eat food. Poop and pee. Drink lots of liquids. Take vitamins. Hang out with the people and the animals inside my house.
I am trying to manufacture to-do lists because they make me feel safe and important and in control. And also stressed and martyred and overwhelmed (which some part of me must like as proof of my importance). I am frantically trying to find new projects of the housebound variety like labeling all the bins in my basement storage area.
“Welcome to the Detox of Busy,” I tell myself.
“Be tender with yourself, self. Returning to the instinctual means your instincts are coming back online. Which means you are feeling everything without being able to distract yourself anymore.”
“And also, Detoxing Busy is a privilege,” I remind myself.
“There are so many right now who don’t have the luxury to come to a Full Stop.
The chance to jump off the runaway train and sit down in the field and stare at the sky? It’s an opportunity, not a punishment.
For the sake of those who do not get to jump off the train, for those who are busier than ever, please take your chance and jump.
Even if you feel like you’ve been pushed off, like you had no intention of sitting in a field right now, like your power has been taken from you, maybe try to flip the lens and see: this is your power returned to you.
In the stillness, you have the power of choice.
Use it.
Use it so that when those who have to stay on the train finally get to rest, you have refueled and you can take over, in whatever little ways you have to offer.
I thought I’d Detoxed Busy through cancer because it WAS a full stop.
In one afternoon, I went from co-running a staging and design company and co-running a not-for-profit, both grassroots things I had tended diligently for the last five years, to running nothing.
All my identities fell away in my front yard as I stood there in the liminal space between E.R. and Children’s Hospital, preparing to go inside and pack my baby’s things for who knows how long to who knows what end, the words of the E.R. nurse ringing in my ears: “If he makes it through this.”
It’s only now I realize I traded a busy complex life for a busy simplified life.
My objective went from building and tending many things to sitting in the Deconstruction and tending one thing: Phoenix’s health.
Much of cancer was a punch in the face and then turning the other cheek to get punched on the other side of the face. You just have to take it and keep taking it. But I also worked the shit out of every angle I could to help Phoenix survive. It was my new full time job, all-consuming. Identity-erasing and identity-making: I am the primary caretaker.
It’s only now, two months out from the remission phone call with Coronavirus looming on the horizon and nothing to do but sit in the field, I realize: I have never Detoxed Busy.
I have done a Busy Cleanse, here and there.
I have learned tools to be mindful in the midst of Busy.
But even as I cleansed, Busy was still in the air, the soil, and the water.
I drank it in without knowing it, breathed it in without realizing, buried my hands in it every time I went outside to plant a seed. Busy is the glyphosate of the American Dream.
“Produce more!” we are encouraged. “If you spray your fields with Busy, there won’t be room to sit because you will have so much abundance, so much to be proud of, and so much money when all is said and done!”
We bought it.
And now here we are.
All that abundance turned to straw, our shelves filled with cans of busy and nothing to spray.
