“Most problems, if you give them enough time and space, will eventually wear themselves out.” – Buddha
In anticipation for the first day of school, my 6-year-old daughter was laying out her clothes and organizing her toiletries in the bathroom. She decided to hang her bronze-colored necklace made of metal of some type (copper, steel, nickel?) on the nightlight in the bathroom. The metal came in contact with both electrical outlet prongs, sparked and broke apart the necklace, thereby breaking the circuit. She was really upset and so it took me a while to understand how it all happened and the seriousness of it.
It wasn’t until after I got the kids to bed that I looked at the outlet which was thoroughly scorched but still operational. I was standing there trying to decide if there was any ongoing danger when my mom called upset. She’d received an email that someone she’d had a short, masked conversation with tested positive for COVID four days later. My mom was feeling terrible for everyone she’d come into contact with since that conversation and was trying to decide her next steps.
This is my worst nightmare – having to deal with crisis at night when I’m tired. I like to joke that I use up all my decisions by 4pm so I better have decided what to have for dinner and whether I’m going to bathe the kids before then or all bets are off. Joking, not joking.
Decisions always make me think of the book Willpower by Roy Baumeister and John Tierney. In it they discuss how decisions sap mental energy or specifically glucose in the brain. It’s why going to the grocery store without a list takes so much more energy than shopping off a list.
I get to the end of the day with two young children, a cat and a job and I can barely string two sentences together. I don’t send emails out at night because I have no resilience or creativity in the evenings. I even avoid looking in the mirror because I have no self-compassion left.
[As an aside, listening to a great podcast between Tara Brach and self-compassion researcher Dr. Kristin Neff, (website at https://self-compassion.org) explained a good part of this when Dr. Neff said that it’s the result of our inner critic piling on all day long. It’s why we need to practice fierce self-compassion. Fierce because we strongly tell our inner critic that we appreciate her efforts in order to criticize ourselves before anyone else does but to please stop and self-compassion because we give ourselves the same grace we give others.]
My mom and I agreed to sleep on what to do about her COVID exposure because she was self-isolating. And I turned off the circuit breaker for the bathroom outlet. Sometimes I just need to pull the plug, get a rest and come back to it in the morning.
Surprised By Joy 