Mindful Mondays: Impermanence
I was going to write another Sleep Watch post but frankly, I’m, well, tired. I’m tired of thinking about sleeping. I’m tired of talking about sleeping. I’m tired of reading sleeping. I’m tired of writing about sleeping. I’m tired of tracking Isa’s sleeping. But most of all I’m tired of being tired.
I think the only way I can get through this right now is just to just… get through it. I’m currently attempting to accept this situation as not good or bad but just what is. I’m trying to embrace my feelings of exhaustion without regarding them negatively. I’m trying to live in the present moment and not look back at the disastrous night before or look ahead anxiously to Isa’s next nap (or returning to work). I’m trying to remind myself that everything changes – the great Buddhist teaching of Impermanence.
I keep asking myself, why is being tired bad? Only because I view it as being bad. (That, and my mind is so frazzled that I just dropped (or put down) my wallet at Old Navy on Friday and then cried for twenty minutes before someone turned it in.) But really, exhaustion is something we perceive as negative because physically we feel less than stellar. Interestingly, our negative feelings about being tired actually make the experience worse than it would be if we just experience the physical sensations without judgment and with the realization that this too, shall pass.
On Friday, as I trudged back downtown to pick up my wallet from Old Navy, I came across a wonderful teaching in Buddhism for Mothers. I was feeling like a super worthless excuse for a human being and I was sure I was going to ruin my life, my daughter’s life and my partner’s life with my absentmindedness and distraction when I came across this paragraph. Even while wallowing in self pity, I recognized how perfectly this message related to my mind state.
When I’m feeling at my lowest ebb emotionally, I notice my tendency to generalize the negativity: everything is dreadful, it always has been and it always will be and it’s all my fault – and everybody else’s too. It sounds almost comical with I’m in a lighter mood but at the time I believe these thoughts. With it’s emphasis on impermanence, Buddhism helps us at such times acknowledge that the mood will pass, that we won’t feel like this for long and might even feel quite happy in a few hours time; we can weather it for now and avoid assigning it any major significance.
I’ve tried to hold on to this teaching this weekend. There are times when I’m better at remembering than others. There are times when I’m better at accepting this teaching (and my tired eyes and aching back) than others. Many have reiterated what I’ve told myself, this too shall pass, and while I know it to be true, it’s hard not to struggle against the unpleasantness now. But if I remember that everything is impermanent, everything changes, I do feel a weight lifting. I do feel… like I can do this.
Then I realize that much of the unpleasantness is my anxiety about how this will affect graduate school and then my return to work. I’ve repeated many times that if I were just at home with Isa, this would be bearable, but when I return to work I’ll be unable to function. How I’ve said this countless times without ever once realizing, but right now you ARE just at home with Isa so right now it IS okay and nothing about right now says anything about six weeks from now, when you’re back at work. Now I see clearly, once again, that only by living in the present moment, and accepting it without labeling it as good or bad, can I find peace. Dwelling in the future, a future I can’t know before it transforms into the present, can do absolutely nothing to improve how I’m feeling now. In fact, it can only make me feel worse.
But what about all the things right now that do bother me? What about my disaster of an apartment and my looming graduate school work (that tomorrow morning will be a large part of my present)? What about the fact that I’m sick of shit sticking to my feet when I walk down my halls but I don’t have the time or energy to sweep?
Well, as a good friend of my said to me today, wear slippers.
Of course. Slippers! And right now, in this present moment, wear slippers is what I shall do.
i pretty much love this entire post.
Great post, and I couldn’t agree more with the sentiment– things will change. I actually had a long talk with H this weekend about this exact thing. He had (another) mini-meltdown, and this time it was because he was worried he was never going to be happy again, that he felt like a failure at managing money (that was hard, because he *is* a failure at managing money…), and that he just feels so overwhelmed. And so we went through and worked on some possible solutions to various problems causing him to feel the way he felt, but once he falls down the meltdown-rabbit hole, it’s very hard to retrieve him, because he suffers most seriously from the whole “everything sucks and it always will” mentality.
I get that way, too, sometimes, but I also try really hard to keep things in perspective, to try to be fruitful in my thinking– what can I do to solve XYZ thing that’s causing me problems? Will this be a problem tomorrow? etc. Not that I don’t wallow. I do. But having H as a partner, as the extreme worrier/fretter/freak-out-er means that one of us has to hold things together, and so, I don’t tend to get to wallow very often, because I have to force perspective onto H.
Sigh. It’s a rough one, but I really liked this post. Good stuff here.
My mom keeps telling me that there is a reason that sleep deprivation is a form of torture…I could not agree more. I now realize that all the enemy would have to do to get me to spill the beans would be to wake mr up every two hours to feed him;)