Do LESS
what i learned when a whale swam by
I walked along the Oregon coastline yesterday feeling out of sorts. I woke up feeling uneasy; not quite myself. My initial thought was “do I have the virus?” I am hyper alert for any signs and symptoms that might point to being infected. I did a full body scan, and no, no physical symptoms.
I knew the usual “tapes” playing in my head were off. It did not feel like depression, or anxiety. Maybe there were twinges of both in my daily world because of the massive amount of stress we are all plagued with right now. But, what I was feeling seemed like something else, and I was not finding the right label for it.
I kept telling myself I didn’t have the right to feel out of sorts because my suffering was not as great as what I am seeing on the news. By comparison, my circumstances were terrific. I was at the beautiful Oregon coast, my family was healthy, I am healthy, we had enough to eat, and just the right amount of toilet paper, not too much, not too little. We even had cherry chip cake with pink frosting. Listing what I am grateful for helped, but that nagging sense of something else persisted like a dull headache. And the more I tried to just ignore the feeling, the more it persisted.
So I decided to go for a walk. My walking buddy, Auggie, a golden retriever, went with me. He is not struggling by the way. All these long walks and extra attention have been very good for his mental health.
I didn’t have the energy to walk any faster than a slow pace, so I spent more time than usual staring at the ocean. And that’s when I saw it: a whale spout. I had never seen one before, but the large burst of a fountain-like spray is unmistakable. And then I saw the slick black body surface and roll gracefully forward. I froze in my tracks.
And in that moment I realized what I was feeling: grief. It was grief for those who are working without sleep while I sit at home. And grief for my own life, the one that got put on hold two months ago. I am a “doer” by nature and right now I am sidelined and my only doing is watching, reading, thinking, writing, and being much more still than I am used to.
Grief expert David Kessler says “If we don’t name it, we can’t feel it. And if we can’t feel it, we can’t heal it.”
So if I can’t have my life back right now, what do I do? David Kessler, leading expert on grief and protege of Elisabeth Kubler-Ross who wrote On Death and Dying (5 stages of grief) says what we are all experiencing right now is a fundamental change to life as we know it. We are all experiencing a loss of routine, loss of touch, loss of gathering for meals and being with people we love. It is not a game of loss, where we compare our loss with other’s suffering and realize it isn’t as great as someone else’s. That does not matter because as Kessler also says…
“The worst loss is ALWAYS your loss.”
If your child cannot go to school, and she is angry, think about her loss as maybe the greatest loss of her life so far. If you just started a new job and are working from home without the benefit of working alongside other people to learn about your new company, this may be YOUR biggest loss to date. If you are like me, and a world-class, highly trained, expert “DOER” then you may be feeling the greatest loss you have ever felt as you sit on the bench. What-ever your loss, because it is YOUR loss, it is the worst loss.
What the Whale Taught Me…
While out walking I had been listening to Brene’ Brown interview David Kessler on her Podcast Unlocking Us. When David said “If you can’t name it, you can’t feel it. And if you can’t feel it, you can’t heal it” I knew immediately what was bothering me. I was grieving and I thought I didn’t have the right to grieve because my pain was so minimal compared to others.
Listening to David’s perspective on grief, I looked out to the ocean and that is the moment I saw the whale spout. There it is. Life moving forward. Even as I was feeling like my life was put on pause, life was still moving forward all around me. By being less of a “doer” my eyes had opened to what was around me. A whale swimming south because it’s spring and time to make baby whales. The crows that come visit every day begging for some bread. The slower pace of life, which I admit, has been up until now causing more STRESS not relaxing me.
All of us are trying to keep ourselves busy. We tell ourselves we can do SO MUCH right now because of all the time we have. What if as part of our “time out” right now we just sit quietly and DO LESS. For me, this pause in the action of life will be about doing less, not more. It’s time I found my “being” mode. Here is a poem by Mary Oliver about the power of being.
Poet Mary Oliver, Wild Geese
You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting —
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.
