When Everything is Stripped Away

I’m finding, our family is finding a new way of being in the world. Prior to getting ill, we were adventuring every weekend, learning, growing, taking on huge projects, playing and going. I was and am grateful for all we were able to do. Like I’ve said before, there wasn’t a single aspect of our life that I took for granted. We didn’t complain about how busy we were or that we were shuffling from one activity to another. It was our choice, and how we were choosing to live our life based on our perspective at that time. I’m still grateful for all we were able to do and all the experiences and beauty that we crammed into life. What I’m noticing now is that it was crammed and that busyness, that always going, that scarcity mindset had its consequences. 

We’ve lived our lives with intention, but there was still a lot of capitalistic culture infused in our day to day lives. Our way of moving through life was with a whirlwind adventure and get things done lifestyle. It was full of meaning, full of intention but it was at a breakneck pace and I still ended every day feeling as though I’d failed because there was so much I’d left undone. When I look at all I’d do prior to getting ill, all that Kendall would do, our kids and what we’d do as a family, it seems unfathomable that 1) we had the energy for it and 2) that we could ever have felt like we were not accomplishing enough. The do it all, have it all mentality that, among many other capitalistic ideological infusions, found its way into our deeply intentional life following everything we did. It was a toxin we were impacted by, but because we were so used to it, we didn’t sense it. 

It wasn’t until my ability to do literally anything was stripped away, like an extreme cleanse, that I realized how much we still suffered under the scarcity mindset of always seeking more. Even if “more” were things that were deeply meaningful to me and to us, there were ways we were missing experiencing their quality by insatiably trying to do and have more. Doing less and having those experiences be full of quality, being present in those experiences as fully as possible, witnessing the subtlety and nuance of being a human, having experiences and finding our way through this world. Subtlety and nuance of thought, emotion, perception, understanding, experience. I do that now, retroactively, by playing them back in my mind. I do that now as I sit with so much—completely undistracted.

We are finding that in stripping away the other—the activity, experience, distraction—the medium through which we were experiencing ourselves, each other and the world, we are learning to more fully be in this life. Present in a way that we never were before, despite so much goodness. A friend that I rest with recently said something to the effect of, “Being able to sit with your emotions is pro level resting.” To have no distractions, to fully inhabit ourselves–thoughts, feelings, values, story–is to be fully human and fully alive.

I’m just a few years into this dismantling. There were blindspots to my intentionalism. I was scared to be still, to waste a moment, to let life pass me by. I was going too fast to really be immersed in the experiences I was having with myself and my Loves. Illness to the extent we are experiencing it has radically slowed us down. Forced stillness. It’s been torture to have not had a choice in this, but I’ve understood since I became an adult that I always have a choice in how I handle anything and what I take away from any experience. What I’m choosing to take away from this, what I’m in the midst of learning, is who I am when everything is stripped away.

• Topics:
• Long Covid