Until sometime in my 31st year, my life was endlessly filled with what the current me would call compulsive over-achievement and terminal busyness. In that transformative year I had a full-time private practice in psychotherapy earning an income that was in the top 2% of professional women’s incomes. I (and the feminist man to whom I was then married) cooked and baked everything from scratch: including whole grain breads and desserts each week and even our own fresh mayonnaise. We did (and shared on a 50-50 basis) all our own housework, laundry and errands.
I was part of a collective creating and administering the first New York Feminist Psychotherapy Referral Service. We held teas (with great trays of my own homemade cakes, cookies and pastries) during which we did group interviews of therapists applying to be on our list.
I designed and crocheted all of my own clothing along with belts, vests, mufflers and hats for the man to whom I was married. And, I had a small side business creating custom crocheted bikinis and mail order crocheted shopping bags (once featured in the Sales and Bargains section of New York Magazine).
I did a daily hour long stretching routine that I later learned was yoga (!) and I rode my bicycle 18-24 miles around the Central Park circumference road 3 days a week in good weather.
I crocheted while waiting on lines at the bank or supermarket, often read while walking on my way to shop and did handwork (crochet or embroidery) whenever I sat with my ex as he watched TV. There was never a moment (except during the few hours when I slept) that I wasn’t engaged in "productive activity."
Except for the details and particular activities, that 31st year was not unlike all the years gone before. Yet, it marked a turning point in my journey. An unremitting backache, an intensely compelling rumbling from deep inside my being and a sudden keen awareness about the context of my "over-achieving" led me through a process that resulted in my making a remarkable series of choices. (See Pirouettes and Reclaiming Rest for more about this time.)
Within a little more than a year, I had sold or given away most of my possessions. I’d bought a brand new, stripped Dodge Tradesman van that I then, with the salvage of my former life, set up as a bed-sitting room. With grace, gentleness and consciousness I took leave of my practice, my marriage, my family, my friends and the whole familiar shape of my life. And, just 4 months after my 32nd birthday, I began driving cross-country to California with no plan at all for what came next.
I’d spent a whole year engaged in a gradual process of slowing my life, disengaging from all the intensity and all the blossoming forth of the preceding years. The compelling pressure from deep within had guided me to and through this extraordinary launching into the yawning unstructured unknown. My inner knowing was clear: I had to get where it was green or I would die. I had to stop the pattern of always "doing" that had long been my only way to attempt to quiet the rapacious voice of my inner critic. This radical moving into stillness was the only path to my survival.
Despite this knowing, I was utterly unprepared for the unstructured stillness of this new life I had been led to embark upon. The "downshifting" into such utter stillness, such empty time was (in the language of those years) mind-blowing! It was enormously exciting and very scary at the same time.
My days were framed by driving, finding camp grounds to sleep in, cooking/preparing my meals and taking walks or bike rides around the campgrounds in which I’d landed. Since it was unexpectedly cold that mid-March, even on the southernmost route, I also spent a good deal of energy figuring out how to stay warm.
A radio hadn’t been part of the "package" of a stripped van, so I made do with a rather good portable radio. Most of the time the "good" radio produced only country music (not a favorite of mine) or static. So, I drove surrounded in silence or while singing my way through an endless and surprising repertoire of love songs and show tunes from the forties and early fifties. (Until then I’d no idea how many of them I knew!)
With nothing "productive" to do, I found myself spending inordinate amounts of time preparing and cleaning up from my meals. And then cleaning up the van from my meal clean up. I spent a lot of time examining and re-examining maps and routes. I arranged and rearranged my things in their storage units. Part of that process was a matter of fine tuning the order I had created without actually living in the middle of it. Still, a whole lot more of that repeated re-organizing was my way to structure the emptiness of such wide-open timelessness. And, it was my way to cope with the edges of anxiety in the midst of that emptiness.
It was confusing and disorienting to have nothing to do, nowhere to have to be, nothing to juggle, no one’s sensibilities to attend. Yet, as I continued to drive westward, I slowly and gradually began to settle into this new way of being in my life. I began to feel my body and my being unwinding, relaxing, slowing down, breathing more deeply. The anxious edges began to melt away. I was able to do less of the make-work that had helped me, in the earliest weeks, to adjust to the total absence of structure.
My mind wandered through memories, "issues," questionings, old unresolved ambivalences, wonderings about what lay ahead. None of this was focussed on "working" or "figuring" anything out. Rather, it was as though my psyche just needed to touch lightly and move on, visiting rather than living into all these territories inside of me.
During the first three months I chose not to engage with anyone along the way. (Except for simple hellos in campground ladies’ rooms.) I called back "home" to report in weekly with one of the three people—my best friend/lover, my sister or my soon-to-be ex—who were my "base camp" for this solo journey. When I felt like it, I made tapes of my reflections and experiences. These I sent back to one or the other of the three of them to share with each other. When I felt lonely I’d wander around in large drugstore-supermarkets like Long’s or Walgreen’s.
The loneliness was more a need simply to be around people rather than a need to engage with them. I craved the stillness, reveled in it, wanted to slip more deeply into it. Engaging with other people seemed premature. I didn’t feel ready yet to look through "outside eyes" at how I was living. The new balance that was growing in me, a sense of being really "okay" in and with myself while "doing" absolutely nothing, seemed still too fragile to submit to anyone else’s opinions/reactions/responses/comments.
After I’d been traveling a while in California, l slowly began to engage with some of the people I met. When and as I did engage (in those early days), I consciously chose not to share anything about my "former life." (Other than the fact that it had given me the financial backing to be free to be "doing nothing" for a while.) This practice of "erasing personal history" (an idea borrowed from Carlos Castanada’s Don Juan books) seemed to make it safer for me to acknowledge my "doing nothing" lifestyle.
I did varying degrees of nothing, living in my van and "on the road" for almost a year and a half before I slowly began plugging back in to a more "ordinary" lifestyle. It had been an enormously radicalizing, profoundly healing time in my life. In the middle of doing nothing "productive" or "worthwhile" by society’s standards, I had come to feel more whole. I felt more okay and more worthy as a being than I’d ever felt in my "productive," busily over-achieving former life.
I had come to know myself in new ways during this long season of fallow, still, empty time. I had come to discover and nourish parts of myself that had never before been known to me. Parts that had had no room to emerge in the middle of a too busy, too connected life. Eating when I was hungry, napping when I was tired, going to sleep and waking up when my body was ready for either, not relating to clock time, doing whatever the energy inside me moved me toward—I learned my own rhythms, felt my own particular flow.
Without my own or other people’s agendas and expectations about emotional intimacy and relatedness, I discovered just how voluptuous my solitude could be, how profoundly it nourished and renewed me. Without the constant clamor of the stimulation and input that came with being so busy and so intensely, relentlessly emotionally connected, there was time for my being to assimilate, incorporate, process, clear and rest itself.
Re-engaging with "regular" life—living in a particular place, finding new work, establishing myself in community, making friends—was a slow and care-full process of exploring my new and renewed self in contexts that I had been away from. There were fits and starts in that re-entry. It was so easy to be co-opted by the ambient paradigm; so hard to stay firmly in my own slowed down center in the midst the overwhelming tide of everyone’s hi-gear living.
Yet, I persisted, utterly and completely committed to a nourishing life in the slow lane; to a life lived from an ongoing, deep connection with my own organic rhythm. Sometimes, then and now, seasons of high activity evolve organically from my slowed pace. This is a recognizably different kind of "busy." Still, even this "organically based" busy can sometimes feels like "too much!" (See Surrender for more about that.) And, the energy of the ambient paradigm often can escalate the "organic busy" into "just mindless busy" if one isn’t paying close attention to one’s belly feelings!
Over the almost thirty years since my re-entry into ordinary life (albeit always now a life in the slow lane), I’ve learned to make retreats-into-stillness a regular part of my living. In the earlier years I’d make sure to do these once or twice a year for 10 days, two weeks, or even (though rarely) a whole month. In the past few of years, I’ve felt an increasing need to take shorter periods more often. And, this year, I’ve been making the space to take 5 or 6 days every month just to unplug and to be still.
These time-outs are much less radical shifts than that original one, much less disruptive. Nevertheless, they create small islands of intentionally and completely fallow, empty time into which I sink deeply and gratefully. And, these times of stillness are always a wonderful hedge against being unwittingly drawn into busyness.
Sometimes, Spirit hands me fallow time: These can be times when several clients graduate themselves, take time out or go on vacation all at once and there’s a space of time before new people come to fill those open spaces. They can be times when no writing, no art, no creative process is in motion in me. Sometimes these "unchosen" fallow periods last longer than might seem "reasonable." Sometimes nothing much seems to be happening inside me during them. I’ve learned not to be concerned about any of it. I may still—even after all these years of learning better—have a few moment of worry that "nothing will ever flow again." But, then I take a deep breath and remember, this is a fallow season, I can do deep rest instead of doing worry!
We all live completely surrounded by a context in which fallow time is devalued, dismissed, denigrated. In this dominant, ambient paradigm fallow time is seen as wasted, non-productive, non-proactive, to be avoided at all cost. It takes courage and persistence to claim/reclaim fallow time as the incredibly profound, essential, empowering and miraculous part of juicy living that it is. Even when "nothing" visible seems to come from such time, you can be assured that the ground of your being is replenishing itself all the while!
Consider giving yourself (or receiving) the gift of empty, still time to rest and replenish your cherished self,
P.S. So many of your delicious e-mails send appreciations for the affirmation, support and nourishment you receive from the site. When I answer them, I don’t always remember to let you know that having your own deck of the Rememberings and Celebrations cards is a way to bring this same loving voice into your everyday world, to have it at hand as you need to remind yourself of the "real" truth moment to moment in the crazimakingness of the so-called real world!
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The card on this page is part of a set of 64 handcolored bookmark-size cards called the Rememberings and Celebrations deck. They can be used as an oracle, a meditation focus or a "book-in-pieces" to kindle and grow a compassionate, gentle, unconditionally loving, fiercely protective inner-Mother to help you carve safe healing space for your emerging self and for the wounded little ones inside.
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