Learning How to Pace Myself (Or, How My Bulldog and I Are the Same Person)
I’m thinking about the difference between abundance and overwhelm, and the ways in which my English bulldog and I are more alike than meets the eye.
Friday morning, kitchen table. An email from my daughter asking if I could help her by ordering copies of her HiSET diploma to prove to her community college that she is a bona fide high school graduate. Sure, I said. Then a simple task became a little bit of a morass, the kind that involves technology and phone menus and hard-to-navigate websites. The snags were no big deal in the long run but could make you lose your shit if you're the least bit overtaxed to begin with.
I was aware of my prickliness; my annoyance disproportionate to the actual situation, which was resolved a mere 20 minutes and $15 later.
My overwhelm was showing.
I feel like I should tell you something: I'm a sprinter, but not in the literal sense. Chalupa is also a sprinter.
Chupie -- one of her many nicknames -- is fast. Really fast. Sometimes I can barely keep up with her. She hurls her small but mighty body through space and also runs out of steam quickly; a good zoom down the driveway and maybe to the corner (about two houses down) will leave her panting, ready for a snack and a seven-hour nap.
We are more alike than meets the eye.
I was talking to my wife yesterday about being tired. I don't know exactly where it comes from, but I have some residual shame about being tired. I'm a person who gets a lot done and also crashes hard. I don't always pace myself well.
"You're a sprinter," Mani pointed out, without judgment. She's right. By 9:00am today, when I left to walk to my office for a morning of appointments, I had already been at my computer for two hours, greeted four writing groups, responded to several emails from current and prospective clients, shared a piece I just had published, and made two corrections on website errors that had come to my attention.
In many ways, I'm slow and steady; it's the aspect of being a Capricorn I identify with the most, that mountain goat making her way up the mountain, stopping to chew on a branch here or chat with the other animals there. But it occurs to me that the mountain goat is not a sprinter. She doesn’t burst her way to the summit; she ambles, never straying too far from her chosen path. For me, reconciling these aspects of my nature is one of the central practices of this lifetime.
This morning, before I headed out, Mani was standing at the sink washing dishes while I prepared to scramble eggs for myself. Chalupa was looking at us both like, why isn't anyone putting food into my mouth?
“Welp,” I said, gesturing around as if to say, “It’s Monday.”
She didn’t miss a beat. Suddenly we were ticking off the blessings – nourishing food, a safe place to live, all five of our kids alive and well, both of us spending our days engaged in things that feel both personally fulfilling and also societally contributive. I sidled up behind her to give her neck a kiss, feeling the abundance of good work, sufficient income, a supportive community, and so much more.
Overwhelm comes and goes; the gratitude that accompanies me for this abundance never leaves, even if it sometimes gets left in the dust from one of my sprints.
Chalupa also gets overwhelmed and sometimes easily stressed. If you open the kitchen window when it’s cold out, as I did this morning to get a better look at a bird, that causes quite the distress. Likewise, if there are unknown vehicles parked on our street, overturned recycling bins, or pot handles facing the wrong direction on the stove. Oh, and bags and packages that don’t go there? Don’t even go there. She loves apples and potato chips and sweet potato and kale and her new chew toy. After she poops, she gets a burst of energy and plays a mean game of tug and fetch. She has jaws of steel. (We do not have this part in common.)
And she loves her people. My God, how she loves her people! In this way, Chupie and I are very similar.
We’re happiest when we’re a) being useful (in her case, this means supervising meal prep), b) eating or sleeping, and c) just being in the company of the folks we love the most. Sometimes these are family; sometimes they are strangers on the street who become best friends fast.
It struck me this morning that over the past five years, I rebuilt my coaching practice from scratch. I don’t often step back to see the big picture like this; the days are full and, like Ferris Bueller said, life moves pretty fast. Not pausing to survey the landscape is a surefire way to get sucked into overwhelm. I know I’m susceptible to it, and that sprinting isn’t a sustainable way to live and work.
I am working on building in more intentional down time; for me this means listening to music on my way to work, then spontaneously having a little dance party when I get there before opening my laptop and sitting down for hours. It means going to synagogue on Saturday mornings, and taking the time to plan some meals before I get groceries so we don’t end up eating pizza three nights in a row.
And it means listening to my wife (if you have a wife, trust me – listen to her) when she sees me starting to spin out and lovingly suggests, “Slow your thoughts. Slow your brain.”
Lastly, and perhaps most importantly, it means continuing to take cues from Chalupa, who plays hard and doesn’t feel any shame when she collapses in a heap on the floor for a well-earned nap, content and unapologetic.