Self-Care
Saturdays are the quiet mornings of a day when I’m not ‘on call’ or expected to be accountable to anyone.
The best day of the week? Sometimes, yes.
Though when the list of demands is extensive and gets only larger each week, I subliminally look to the weekends as space to catch up, when a more intelligent perspective would be as space to breathe and recharge. Recharging can mean different things to each person.
These days, instead of binge-watching streamed shows, I’ve been indoctrinated into the world of ‘Townscape’. While immersed in the digital pretend world, I am creating. However, its system and rules are teaching how capitalism works, I am enthralled at how well the design triggers the development of dopamine.
I know that real recharging is spending time on activities that either don’t produce dopamine or at least are productive in a self-care way. The definition of self-care is: “care for oneself.” It is not: “indulge in anything that makes you feel good.” Taking care of yourself is a multitude of daily routines, experiences, and actions, including responsible choices. But knowing what is good for you is not always enough to motivate such actions.
Perhaps creating categories such as rest, health, relationships, and more, then listing activities under each. After reviewing my list (above), I realized that more activities require effort and don’t exactly inspire joy while doing the world, but they do nourish and trigger dopamine when completed. So on this sunny Saturday, after a morning that I will fully admit has been both unproductive and not at all restful, I look around my tiny office, observing the piles of books, papers, bottles, cords, highlighters, digital devices and more reminding me of the commitments I have made to follow up on.
Following up on commitments is important to me. However, I struggle every minute of every day to avoid the efforts that will take effort and my full attention. It’s just so easy to blank out while feeding cows, harvesting fields, and participating in a capitalistic ‘game’ that, in the end, I am paying for with both my time, attention and sometimes pocketbook.
It never helps that with everything I could do, choosing what to do first triggers me to avoid the tasks I need to do most. If only I could sit in the awareness that engaging in hard work, I could focus on the experience, not as taking me away from cheap and easy but filling me up in better ways.
