This weekend, to celebrate my wife Holly’s birthday last week, we headed up to our get away in the mountains.
About two and a half hours away is a small city situated next to a lake, surrounded by opportunities for skiing and forests of pine trees. We try to get away here as often as is practical, renting the same room in the same hotel, and just spending time together away from the world.
But our plans for a quiet weekend took a rather different turn.
We hadn’t been in the hotel room for more than about an hour, when I began yawning deeply, and struggling to stay awake. Holly suggested that I take a nap, and so I grabbed my pillows and a blanket, and crashed out on the floor in front of the gas fireplace. The sound of the fan on the fireplace is a perfect white noise for me, and I slept deeply, waking a few hours later.
But as sometimes happens, my mind never quite woke back up.
We spent a quiet evening together reading and talking, and when the time came for bed, I found it hard to fall asleep, which is funny because I never really felt like I had properly woken up since the nap. Eventually, somewhere around 1am, I finally managed to fall asleep, only to awaken about 4 hours later with a fairly nasty migraine. My head was throbbing, my neck was burning, I felt nauseous, and I knew that the rest of my day was probably trashed.
So I headed back over to the fireplace, where I spent the next 5 hours trying to sleep.
Eventually it came time for us to check out. I’d taken some medication a short time before, and thankfully I was able to ride in our truck without throwing up, but the journey home wasn’t the drive I had been hoping for. We took the canyon route home, and driving beside a river and pine trees covered in snow is usually a beautiful sight, but this time all I wanted to do was get home and sleep some more.
And even now, sitting in my office at home on a Sunday afternoon, I feel tired, weak, and ready to crash.
Yet as I look back over the last few months, I can see that I have been ‘courting’ this migraine for a while now. I've been sleeping less than I usually do, drinking less water than I know is good for me, and honestly taking less time to do the things that I know helpful, like rest, meditation and being careful about my nutrition. I've also been less frequent about taking the right supplements that can help prevent or reduce the severity of migraines like this.
But I also realize that’s only part of the story.
Because if I’m truly honest with myself (and therefore with you), I have to admit that I've been running in a stress loop for a while now. There are several things clamoring for my attention, and I've been guilty of trying to follow all of them. I’m trying to find my way forward from where I am, to where I want to be, and it’s easy to get caught up in chasing the future.
And not remember to honor where I am right now.
I think we’ve all been through such a strain these last few years that we need to be living with more intent for the now, and getting back to understanding who we are as a people, as a community, as nations and as a world. We have lived, and are living, through moments of history that are unlike anything in the last 50 years, and it’s taking a toll on all of us.
I think most of us would agree that life today is significantly different to where it was 3 years ago.
For me, I see a loss of common community, a decrease in kindness, and a fracture of the basic human decency that has done so much to sustain us in the past. I see people who are exhausted, and who need space to unpack and unwind. I see a desperate need for the simplicity of human goodness, where we reach out to each other out of concern instead of conflict.
I think we’re all tired, and it’s easy to ignore it and keep going until our minds or our bodies break, and we’re forced to rest so that we might heal.
I can see how I have lost a sense of now over the last few months, as I’ve been trying to change the future.
So I guess this reflection really is about reminding both of us that we need to slow down sometimes, and honor the moment that we have in front of us. To take some time for rest, hydration, relaxation and relief. To treat ourselves with the level of kindness we would treat others, and to show our gratitude for all that we do have by letting it be enough for a while.
I guess it’s really about finding a balance between what was, what is, and what could be.
And understanding that in this moment, we are enough.
— Dr. Alan Barnes
@maddrbmusings