When the week was hard work and you run around like a chicken with its head cut off to get things done. The weekend needs to be staying home to relax and doing things that require little effort or intellect for the whole weekend. Problem is that during these moments of immobilization, your brain is annoyingly racing with things that need to be done, food that needs to be cooked and laundry that just keeps piling up.
Times like this I sit back and remembered something Mary Mudd told me years ago... The secret of life: “All that matters, in the end, is that you are loved.” I was lucky to hear her take on what is important and what isn’t when I was in my late twenties but it took me years to finally really get it.
"You spend half your life worrying about things that won’t concern you in the slightest at the end. When you’re lying in bed dying, you want people to sit by your side. That’s it. It’s easy to get tricked by dreams of money, success and things, but all the money in the world doesn’t buy you kindness. You get that because you gave it."
Living to give kindness wherever you can is a different aim than the usual trajectories, but almost every person on their deathbed has told me some version of this advice. I am talking about people from all walks of life, people dying young and those leaving this existence after more than a hundred years. I can say now, at 63, that it is a good way to live. I think that tuning into this view of what we are here for is why sometimes imagining my own death calms me down. I remember what I must do until my time comes.
By allowing ourselves an interlude of doing nothing, letting the wild horses run around inside our mind and then tire out, we open up the possibility of listening to the still, small voice within. I find this same voice when I write this blog, once I’m done with the mere recording of doings and get to the person under all the activities and conversations. I sometimes resist getting to this depth, because sorrow may be hiding there, but once I reach it and let it be what it is, I feel a powerful and simple contentment. Here I am, alive right now.
Turning off the anxiety can be infuriating. The cart is placed before the horse, and you don’t get anywhere at first. But if you persevere, if you say to your own crowded thoughts, “Hey, give me a break,” and go back to a birdsong, you will seize some fine moments that do calm you down and put you in the aliveness that is the best life has to offer.
I also find for me the earliest way to gain the calm is to sit and watch a comedy movie or sitcom to enjoy & get me to the here & now. I try to laugh, love and remember what is really important!
Nana
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