tired bones, rest, and the bachelor
When this bear of a body has screamed loud enough for long enough, I just want the noise to stop. Ditching any notion of gaining understanding, or growing from this, or learning some grand life lesson in the middle of the pain, my instinct is to cover my ears and check out. Numb is a pair of earplugs. Comfortable and quiet, numb can let you feel an escape from that one nasty noisy thing that has a way of taking over. Numb tunes it all out, a hall pass to pretend it doesn’t exist, an instant auditory vacation. Even though that thing may still be true and happening, the earplugs of numb are a giant dose of intentional ignorance, sometimes as a means of survival.
I haven’t always been a fan of The Bachelor. There were years that my nose tipped at the thought of watching that brand of mindless babble. Waste of time. Pointless. Insert your own moral high ground here. Then 2011 happened. After escaping 15 seasons of The Bachelor and 6 seasons of The Bachelorette, I finally jumped off the high dive and landed in an ocean of drama and tears and “you know the producers are just keeping her on for ratings” commentary during commercial breaks. Maybe curiosity or maybe boredom, but mainly the 25 staples holding my gut together pushed me into those battles for a rose. I needed numb. This surgery was rough and had left a mark in more ways than one, and on this side of it all I can see how rest and growth could have been better nurtured in that place, but my core was weak, and my core was weak. Both the center of my body and spirit felt ripped wide open. Too fragile and too painful to acknowledge or listen to at the time, I chose numb. I looked forward to that alternate reality every week, and still do. I am always reaching for ways to check out of this loud body.
Chronic illness steals your gusto, your niceties, your basic human maintenance skills. It’s exhausting. But let’s just take chronic illness off the table- this being human is not for the faint of heart. Which is why we escape it. Netflix marathon or heroine, don't fool yourself, we all numb. Insanely different consequences, but both a way to break from the tiredness of wearing skin. How do you escape?
There is a place for healthy diversion, but only if we can have our finger on the pulse of when an activity gives life versus when it takes it away. The best way I know to define the kind of life I am talking about is this: life is soul energy. That sounds super new age and transcendent, but I really don’t mean for it to. I had to make this distinction when I thought that energy was unattainable for me. Physical bodily energy, pep, zest- give it whatever label you want, and it will still be something I struggle with daily. My bones feel tired, and not in a nap and recover or I need more B 12 kind of way. If I waited to do anything until I had the physical momentum to do it, I would be a piece of furniture. Out of necessity, I had to find another fuel source for my days.
There is a source of life that can be my life when I feel I have no life in me to give.
A rest that gives energy has less to do with closing my eyes, though that is entirely necessary, and more to do with opening them. When I wake up to what is around me and to the understanding that I am not the source, it brings a freshness from the inside out. So much of my internal exhaustion comes from this broken cycle of wishing I had more energy to participate in life, being frustrated that I don’t, and numbing out in disappointment. This pattern robs me of the energy I do have. I have found that the kind of rest I choose either gives more life or takes it away.
Resting to resist
Resting to renew
Two different kinds of rest, two completely different outcomes.
Resting to resist-
Flat out avoidance. This is intentionally putting in those earplugs to numb. Something is hard or difficult or noisy and you look for something else to mute it all out. The danger of a mute button is that in an attempt to silence the roar, you mute life. The good stuff, the rough stuff, the stuff stuff. All of it goes blank and you feel like a detached visitor in your own world. It starts like this- I am run down and depeleted, but I have something at hand I need to complete. Feeling that I don’t have what it takes to tackle what’s in front of me, I search for a distraction to lift me out of the discomfort. I open my phone and scroll Pinterest, I click “YES” to tell Netflix that I am, indeed, still watching, I look for anything that will keep me blissfully removed from that pain point. Pinterest is not poison, I am not anti-media, anti-social platforms, anti-Target, puzzles, reading, bubble baths, Jeni’s ice cream, or anti-any of the other innocuous activities that could be listed here, I am just growing in my awareness that these things are often mute buttons for me when I approach them with the desire to numb out instead of savoring them as the gifts they are. After scrolling or eating or tuning out the world for a while, I come out the other side in some kind of stupor. Not really feeling more rested, definitely not feeling more energy, not feeling much of anything at all. Pain is difficult to be present with, particularly when it cannot be immediately soothed or removed. Numbing to not feel that pain seems a promising alternative when you are in the middle of it. It may be a buoy help you survive for a season, but it never brings real lasting relief. Resting to resist is not about the activity, it is about a position of the heart. From this place I am attempting to shut down, close off, and isolate myself from the noise/pain, which isolates me from everything and everyone in turn. No matter the outward activity taking place, coming at it from this angle always robs me of life because life is that very thing I am seeking to avoid at the time.
Resting to renew-
That hard thing, that loud thing may still be there. As a matter of fact, its presence is usually the reminder I need to point me towards my need for this deeper kind of rest. Resting to renew, much like resting to resist, is an internal matter, a heart posture. On the resistance path, I tend to shut down because my focus is fixated on me- what I feel, what I am lacking, what I wish were different. My pain becomes the center of my orbit, and the weight of that is too heavy to be present in so I resist it entirely. When I choose rest as renewal, I start with that same awareness that I am not the source and have limited resources/energy/strength to complete what is in front of me, but I don’t let it stop there. Instead of mulling it over and getting stuck on what I don’t have, I remind my weary heart that there IS a source, an unlimited and overflowing supply of life and love and energy that I can find my rest in. In Him I live and move and have my being. He is before all things and in Him every single thing is held together. I don’t just think about this as a really lovely notion, I put it on like clothes that cover me. I use it like a medicine that helps heal me. I take it in like food that nourishes me. I have to. When we experience or face something beyond our capacity to manage, beyond ourselves and our limited resources, we can either become hopeless, or we can connect with someone or something that is truly beyond what we have access to. This is what happens when we seek medical care, we recognize that we don’t have the knowledge to figure out what is happening in our bodies, but someone else does. So we connect to means more than our own, and by doing so, we can get access to much needed treatment, medications, and care plans that tap into resources we previously did not have. My gratitude for the medical care I have available to me now and have had my entire life runs so deep. I am aware of it every time I infuse my nutrition or meet with a physician or have the ability to call one of my clinicians. It is a tangible expression of help and healing that has brought me this far. In the same way my body needs this support, my soul desperately needs it as well. I want to be fully awake to this gift of a life, and I know that these circumstances that are beyond me require a source that is beyond me. Having the understanding that someone super-nature, above and beyond the laws and processes of nature, created this intelligent and intricate world of cosmos and honey bees and peaches and salivary glands, is my present reminder that I have absolutely every single thing I need. For me, this is rest as renewal. From this posture, taking a nap or savoring a delicious meal or even working can be done from a place of deep inner rest because I am so aware that He is a well that will not run dry. I do not have to wring out my tired body for a few small droplets when there is a river out there, and I can come to it any time. This is soul life. This is eyes wide open rest, this breathes the life and marrow back into my bones and lets me do another day. Certain rhythms help nurture this rest in me: silence & solitude (getting still enough and quiet enough to let the debris of my day and my busy mind settle to begin to see things more clearly), going marveling (like a scavenger hunt for the amazement and wonder that exists in the most ordinary of things), gratitude (recognizing the gifts, thanking the giver, generosity results), and practiced presence (cultivating an increasing awareness of God present, Immanuel, with us). More to come on those, but it surely needs to be said that I am not writing from a place of “killing it,” because I certainly am not. The only thing I seem to be consistently killing is time, but my awareness is growing and I am reaching more and more often for this better way.
If reading this feels just a bit Jesus heavy and you wish it were more practical, I get that. Faith can feel far off and fluffy when offered up next to very real, very tangible pain. When I made the leap into writing out loud, I knew the only way I could do it was to write from what I have experienced and to write from a place of honesty. That is truly all I have. So I offer no edited palatable bulleted list of ways to fix a life marked by suffering, knowing full well that is exactly what I would want to pop up from a quick google search on my hardest of days, but it just isn’t in me. I write with suffering on one side and hope on the other. They seem like ill matched partners, but having spent a decent amount of time with them both, I am learning how their sharp contrast makes me see a deepness and richness in this life that is so worth not being numb to.