[2022-08-02] Slowing down
Today, I ran a load of regular laundry on the hand-washing cycle because I had failed to adjust the dials even though I swear I looked at each one. I fixed that oversight on the next load of laundry only to discover, when I opened the lid of the washing machine at the end of the cycle, that the drum was empty; I looked down to see that the laundry basket full of dirty clothes was still on the floor. Later, as I was baking bread, I dumped the yeast on top of the salt even though my brain was telling me, "don't dump the yeast on top of the salt." (It was like the White Bear experiment: participants who were asked to not think of a white bear ended up doing just that more than once a minute in a five-minute period.)
"Is this what they call 'chemo brain'?" I wondered. Not likely, as I haven't had chemotherapy in more than a year and a half. In fact, I never really felt that I experienced brain fog while undergoing cancer treatment, though perhaps that's because I didn't demand much from my body and brain while recovering from chemo.
"Is this old age?" I asked next. Hard to chalk this up to age, as I'm only 54. (Wait, I'm actually 56. Is not remembering your age a sign of old age?)
"Is this because I'm trying to do too much at the same time?" I questioned. Most likely. My brain is frequently on to the next thing before I'm done with the first thing. This happens when I'm doing chores, when I'm talking, and when I'm scouring the aisles of Costco looking for an item that I know is on sale.
I've had to resort to self-talk to curtail my tendency to multitask. When I'm tempted to pick up a new task before I've completed the one I'm on, I often tell myself, "Finish this before you start that." Increasingly, I will let texts and emails sit if I'm already engaged in something that I shouldn't interrupt, such as a conversation with my daughter. And, as I explained in Mise en place, I will often prepare the ingredients for dinner early in the afternoon so that the cooking process can be less frenetic.
My ability to cope with a lot of things coming at me at once, to work quickly and to anticipate what's coming next served me well in my career, whether in my teens when I was a short-order cook in a busy pub or in my 50s when I was an assistant deputy minister of communications. These same behaviours felt like a necessity in my non-work moments, as I strove to get as much done as possible.
But now that I've retired and I have the luxury of time, I want to learn to slow down. I'm surprised that I didn't think of adding "slowing down" as a sub-element under peace as a priority. The reality is that in the week since I wrote that blog post, I've spent very little time engaged in peaceful pursuits, the exception being walking through Stewart Park in Perth with my husband and watching Tidying Up with Marie Kondo on Netflix before falling asleep.
Looking at my accomplishments log for the past week, it's clear that I'm not very good at spending time on activities that would foster peace of mind. It's not enough for me to say something is a priority. I have to actually spend time on that priority.
That said, perhaps the point of declaring a priority is to shift where we spend our time. Maybe saying "these are my priorities" is less about reflecting what is and more about reflecting what is hoped for. So "I'm not very good at fostering peace of mind" becomes "I'm not very good at fostering peace of mind yet." I'll keep working at it.
