Struggle to rest? Lessons from a snow day.

It’s been 36 hours and there’s still no power,
The tree in my garden is lying cracked open horizontally on the grass,
Starbucks hasn’t one muffin left in their cabinet,
And the roads are still almost empty.
 
The temperatures in Austin reached freezing this week,
No snow,
No storms or blizzards,
But a solid temperature of 0 degrees Celsius.

Wouldn't see the Scot's behaving this badly.
 
Yesterday, I had multiple calls booked,
A meditation class to run,
An EIQ live session,
And a couple of clients to speak to,
Alongside my usual work.
 
I was also staying in the house of someone new in my life,
I had limited clean clothes,
Not a single clean pair of pants,
None of my usual food choices,
And of course,
I had PMS spots emerging left right and centre.

Because why wouldn’t the universe gift me with acne right now?
 
True to standard millennial problems,
I had to save my various batteries for my calls,
Hotspot my data for my lives,
Which meant no video and suboptimal quality,
And lots of in between times when I really needed to do some work,
Yet couldn’t risk opening my laptop in case it ran out of juice.
 
Instead in those in between times,
We played cards,
Worked out in the garage,
Chilled out,
Took advantage of enforced stoppage,
And it got me thinking. 
 
I’d have been so frustrated in the past,
Incredibly anxious about my workload and the disruption to my routine,
Would have written todays email with paper and pen,
Just to feel like I was doing something,
Because God forbid, I wasn’t doing something.
 
A client asked us on the podcast this week,
Why do I feel like I have to fill every gap of time with sound,
With distraction,
And avoid the stillness of nothing?
 
In 1654, Blaise Pascal was quoted as saying:
“All of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone.”
And yet here we are over 300 years later,
Still struggling with the same damn issues.
 
I think the reasons for this are myriad,
Some revolve around our lack of desire to be alone with our thoughts,
Others more so around our need to be productive in order to feel worthy,
Others in our dysregulation and attempts to manage our nervous system.
 
But two things notably changed my relationship with productivity.
 
The first?
Finally understanding what it meant to have values.
I kept parroting my value of love, 
Of compassion,
Yet worked so much that I barely saw my friends and family,
Let alone created space for someone new to enter my life.
 
Know your values,
Come back to them with every decision you make.
I still do that now,
Like when I was getting my ass whipped at Monopoly deal and noticing the voices in my head starting to panic,
You value connection,
Acceptance,
And what does that look like in this moment?
 
The second thing that changed my relationship with productivity was reading 4000 weeks,
After a pretty monumental shift in my life last year,
And it made me realise a couple of things. 
 
“The day will never arrive when you finally have everything under control—when the flood of emails has been contained; when your to-do lists have stopped getting longer; when you’re meeting all your obligations at work and in your home life; when nobody’s angry with you for missing a deadline or dropping the ball; and when the fully optimized person you’ve become can turn, at long last, to the things life is really supposed to be about. Let’s start by admitting defeat: none of this is ever going to happen. But you know what? That’s excellent news.” 
 
Accept that there will always be things to do,
You may as well live life with that knowledge,
Otherwise you’ll wake up at 90 years old with the same old to-do list and a life you’ve missed out on.
 
Develop a worth within yourself that isn’t dependent on how much you earn, 
How much you provide,
And definitely not in how much body fat you store.
 
I see your shame-based fear of not being good enough,
The fear of never feeling enough to be noticed,
To be lovable,
To belong,
But I can promise you that there is no magic number of productivity hours that will give you that feeling.
 
I wish I had a magic pill that would give you a sense of worthiness,
Without achievement of validation,
But instead I’ll just share my learnings,
The journeys of myself and my clients,
In the hope that one day,
You’ll give yourself the grace of feeling whole enough as you are,
To sit in silence without a need to distract yourself,
And to take that snow day without guilt.