To Rest Fully

Dedication to the armchair of nothingness and other reflections by a recovering addict to busy

Some Saturdays, the body demands that I rest, and then rest some more. Yesterday was one of those days where I spent a lot of my time in what my husband affectionately refers to as the armchair of nothingness. It’s where I go when I am really done, and when there is no interest at all in doing things, or even reading or listening to music. Just flaked out.

It did me good. By late afternoon, I was ready to head out for the daily walk, and on the way home we found in the Little Free Library a book I had been looking forward to reading and had already put on hold from the library. So reading that became my plan for the rest of the day.

You might think that after all that resting, I might have trouble sleeping. But actually I even slept in this morning, only getting up for my meditation shortly before 5 a.m.

Work Addiction and Burnout

I didn’t always identify as a work addict. The first decade or so of my adult life was spent at home with my kids and a fairly undemanding schedule of hanging out with friends, reading, and so on. Oh, I got really busy and exhausted trying to keep up with housework, meal preparation, and all the demands of small children and later adding on school routines.

But the next 3 decades got gradually more intense with the piling on of more and more work: running a business. having increasing volunteer responsibilities at church, and gradually doing more with the association till I was running it as President.

It was the proverbial frog in the pot with the heat going up so very slowly that I never knew how bad it was getting until I hit my first burnout wall about 20 years ago and spent a year stunned and depressed.

It doesn’t really matter what the addiction is. The core experience is eerily similar.

In her recent article about ‘the agony of the ecstasy’, The Therapist Who Came Undone wrote the above, ending with, “You cling to the promise of the second even while you’re living the first.”

I was on such a high just before it all fell apart that first time. I had spent six months in a choir rehearsing hard for Handel’s Messiah so we could perform at the Basilique in Montreal instead of the MSO and its choir, and the performances had been an extremely gratifying success. My business was growing well and prospering. The association which I was helping lead was busy and productive. I was feeling that my work on the church board was essential.

I was spending an awful lot of time in my volunteer work, too much, considering I was juggling work, association, church, choir, family, friends, and my personal needs.

In retrospect the crash was inevitable. But I was so enthralled with the high, the ecstasy, that I somehow could keep ignoring the agony that was screaming underneath.

It would take me a couple more repetitions of this cycle of increasing busyness, hitting a wall full tilt, then being enmired in a depression for a year or more before I finally learned the lesson.

I needed to stop treating my body like a machine that I could just wind up and run and run, and I needed actually to take wellness seriously.

I began to meditate with a group of Buddhists every Sunday morning and went back to incorporating regular meditation and mindfulness into my daily life. I started coming to terms with my unhealthy patterns and began to learn to listen to myself more.

Covid and Taking Wellness Seriously

However it took the shock of Covid, from the shutdown in March 2020 to the growing awareness over the past 6 years of how fragile health can be, to get me to understand how serious my cyclical depression was and how equally seriously I needed to take wellness practices and my spirituality.

In fact just the past year or so has been a tremendously pivotal time for me as I began walking 7 days a week and properly integrating other wellness practices into my daily routine as well as finding a healthy and supportive faith community with a wonderful choir.

Being able to sing regularly is a key part of my wellness. Years when I wasn’t in choir were really hard.

It is truly humbling to realise how long it has taken me really to listen to my body attentively and to stop when I have become too tired. To know before I become ill that it is time properly to rest, hydrate well, and double down on necessary restorative practices.

But this is what it is to be human. It takes exactly the time it takes to learn everything that is need. Some of us are quick studies at one thing while being apparently hopelessly laggard at other things. Each human over the course of life does not progress at the same rates physically, intellectually, psychologically, emotionally, and spiritually. At some points one kind of development seems to race forward while another seems to move at an almost imperceptible pace, and progress keeps going back and forth between the various kinds of development.

Recovering From Addiction

I imagine myself in a circle of fellow travelers introducing myself. “Hi, I’m Nicole. I’m an addict to busy.” Part of recovery is the recognition that one’s vulnerability to that addiction is lifelong. It isn’t simply something to get over and be done with. So I will doubtless have more weeks like I just had when I did too much and pushed myself too hard. But now there is a greater awareness of needing a day or more properly to rest and recover, and then needing to find a better pace for the coming weeks.

My fellow travelers are not just those who have my addiction. I recognise all those who are recovering from a widew variety of addictions as those from whom I can learn and whom I might at times help. We companion each other.

Ram Dass popularised the saying, “We are all just walking each other home.” When I read those words, I feel instinctively that they are deeply true. There is a profound comfort in knowing not only that we are on the road together, but that we are finally going home.