Until sometime in my 31st year, my life was always 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 actually yoga and I rode my bicycle 18-24 miles around the Central Park circumference road three 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 partner as he watched TV. There was never a moment (except during the few hours when I slept) that I wasn't engaged in so-called 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, a 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, kindness 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 the past year engaged in a gradual process of slowing my life, of disengaging from all the intensity and all the blossoming forth of the preceding years. The pressure from within had guided me to and through this 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 vicious voice of my inner critic. This radical moving into stillness seemed the only path to my survival.
Despite this knowing, I was entirely unprepared for the unstructured stillness of the new life I had been led to embark upon. The downshifting into so much stillness, so much empty time was (in the language of those years) mind-blowing. It was edgy, scary and exciting in equal measure.
My days were framed by driving, finding camp grounds to sleep at, cooking/preparing my meals and taking walks or bike rides around the campgrounds in which I'd landed. Since, even on the southernmost route, it was unexpectedly cold that mid-March, 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 presumably high quality portable radio. Most of the time the radio produced only country music (not a favorite of mine) or static. So, I drove surrounded in silence or while singing my way through a lengthy 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 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 before 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 my 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 else's sensibilities to attend. Yet, as I continued to drive westward, I little by little 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 focused either on working at or figuring out anything. 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, it all seemed still too fragile to submit to anyone else's opinions/reactions/responses/comments.
After I'd been traveling a while in California, l tentatively 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 except 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 Castaneda'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 little by little began plugging back in to a more ordinary lifestyle. It had been a radicalizing, 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 about my self and more worthy as a being than I'd ever felt in my productive, busily over-achieving former life.
I got to know myself in new ways during this long season of fallow, still, empty time. I discovered and nourished 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 the texture of 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 it nourished and renewed me. Without the constant clamor of the stimulation and input that came with being so busy and so emotionally invested with others, 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 careful 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 dominant paradigm; so hard to stay firmly in my own slowed down center in the midst the overpowering tide of everyone else's high-gear living.
Yet, I persisted, unswerving in my choice of a nourishing life in the slow lane; 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 more organically based busy can sometimes feels like too much. (See Surrender for more about that.) And, the energy of the dominant paradigm often can escalate the organic busy into just-mindless-busy if we aren't paying close attention to our belly feelings.
Over the more than thirty three years since my re-entry into ordinary life (albeit 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, more recently, I've been making the space to take just about a week each month to unplug and be in stillness.
These time-outs are much less radical shifts than that original one, much less disruptive. Nevertheless, they create small islands of intentionally and wholly fallow, empty time into which I sink 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 not-consciously-chosen fallow periods last longer than might feel comfortable or welcome. 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 moments of worry that nothing will ever flow again. But, then, I take a deep breath and remember, “Oh, 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 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 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 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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