Yesterday I woke up and would have sworn that every cell in my body ached. If I could have stayed in bed I would have, but my mind was already swirling with anxieties, my usually somewhat hidden insecurities jabbing away at my tender flesh.
I would have told you that I had done nothing to warrant this bodily revolt, but I knew that I would simply have been deceiving myself. The truth is I had been exhausted on Sunday, so exhausted I could barely stand and had to leave a reception early before I collapsed. Even then, I only allowed myself 2 hours before pushing myself further, pushing myself until I had to stop, and starting up again the moment I had the slightest charge in my energy stores.
It seems I am the queen of unrealistic self-expectation. For some reason this second round of unpacking has been harder than the first. Then, I was so happy just to be here that I gave myself space. Now, I've been here a month, and I inadvertently let my evil doppelganger out of her box, the little voice that says "why aren't you all unpacked yet?", "why haven't you weeded all the flower beds", "why haven't you trimmed the shrubbery", "why haven't", "why haven't", "why haven't....." The problem with that voice is that it looks for all the failures, and refuses to see all the successes. I know perfectly well that there is no rush. No one expects more, or cares, and even if they did, it would be their problem, not mine. But I've spent nearly 60 years letting that voice butt-in and have her way. Perhaps it is time to stop.
Yesterday, really for the first time since moving in, I sat down and wrote my morning pages. I wrote again this morning. I had to give myself permission to write first, rather than unpack, work in the garden, or take my walk. If I do all those things first, I will never write, and if I never write out my thoughts, I let my guard down. If I lose touch with my thoughts I let those little worms of insecurity rise up to the surface where they have no business living. In retrospect it seems I do this every summer, try to cram everything into the early morning, and then end up struggling all the more. But this summer the stress of the move, even of a good move to a place that feels so strongly my place, has amped up my tendency toward self-criticism.
In a couple of weeks I'll be embarking upon my 60th year on this earth. This is not something I want to carry into my 60s. It is time to let the things I think and say and believe, the words I tell everyone else, sink into the deepest darkest recesses of my own heart. It is time to hammer the last nail into that coffin and seal up that little voice the screams "not good enough" once and for all. I don't have to have a perfect house, or a perfect garden, if I am tired and forget to run the dishwasher the world will not end. I am allowed to fail, to be tired, to be wrong, to make mistakes
I am still tired today. But I will not push myself. The new bookshelves arrived, but if I don't have energy to carry them up the stairs today, so be it. There will always be another day. And if there is not another day, if today is the last day, bookshelves will be the least of it.
Yesterday, I wrote my morning pages, and I let Tikka drag me out for a walk. It was a longer walk than I felt like taking, but I felt better for it. Afterward, as I stood in the shower, I was struck by the combination of color shown above. Such a simple thing, a bathroom wall, a door, a towel, fog on the shower door. But it changed my perspective. I thought how lovely it was. I didn't pick the wall color, it was here before me. The towel may not really match, but I didn't think about that, didn't berate myself because I still haven't gone out and purchased a towel bar on which to hang the towel. Instead I thought how lovely it looked draped over the door, how happy that momentary observation made me.
And I rested. Later, I realized that the colors in my bathroom are the colors in my new glasses. As I sit here right now I see the same colors in the walls of my office, in the shadow of light passing through a sheet of glass and a watercolor on vellum, in the colors of the clouds on this rainy morning. These are the moments that count, not the stories we tell ourselves so that we feel more successful, or accomplished, or whatever. We are already accomplished; we are already perfect. Perhaps that is another myth we tell ourselves when we think we are striving for perfection. What if it is our striving that actually makes us imperfect? What if we only see our perfect selves in those quiet moments when we touch someone else's hand, when we watch the bird in the tree, when we listen with our hearts and our minds, when we just allow ourselves to be?
