I have been told, by people in the know, that after a good vacation one feels rested and restored. You want to return to your regular life, and do so with a renewed vigor. This doesn’t seem to be what happened with me. Instead, I have experienced a surprising upheaval, and I am finding that thoughts that I have long kept at bay are surfacing, and demanding my attention.
As a therapist, I have often explained anxiety attacks as occasions during which your anxiety attacks you. It attacks because for too long you have left some aspect of yourself, or your concerns unheeded. Your anxiety had no choice! It had to attack much the way my very disobedient cat, Circe does when she wants me to feed her, let her out, or some other very urgent thing.
I haven’t been feeling anxiety, but I have been feeling that some long repressed desire is flooding to the surface. And I think it has to do with balance.
Symptoms:
Spending time on the internet researching apartments for rent in Thailand. Considering the flight and then researching Panama and San Miquel de Allende.
Frustration with the absence of a warm and sunny outdoor pool. Resentful refusal to attend the cold pool in the gym I belong to. Jumping on my trampoline instead and calling it good.
Inappropriately wearing Thai kaftans over long underwear. Staying in the bamboo pajamas gifted me by the airline for way too long in the morning.
Spending undue amounts of money on orchids left over from Valentine’s day and so filling my kitchen table that there is no room to eat there. Creating such a jungle that my clients can’t find the clock.
Researching places in Thailand and South America again, and contemplating time zones and zoom.
So its bad. And it hasn’t passed yet. I am forced to contemplate the cure, but before I do that I must explore the nature of the disease.
I think part of the problem has to do with the dramatic contrast between the way I spent my time in Thailand the way I spend it here. I honestly don’t have complaints about my work, which is meaningful to me and rich. I do have complaints about the weather in the winter, but also questions about how much time one should spend working.
Culturally, I am very much a part of the protestant ethic, a rampant illness shared by much of the West. There is a kind of unease we Westerners often feel when we aren’t “doing anything”. Like the discomfort that many have with silence, there is a way in which open time frightens us by leaving our minds, however briefly, unoccupied. I don’t think that has been my problem, however. I think rather that the imbalance has been more one of not adequately honoring my love of beauty and the feeling of melting into the vastness of undoing.
Maybe this is a surprise to some who know me. Beauty is very much a part of my life. I am an artist, after all. But I detect that there has been some postponement of rest; some sense that I can not relax yet because there is so much that needs to be done.
None of this is referencing the usual and many tasks of life. It’s not cleaning, paying bills, walking the dog or shopping. It’s not saving for retirement or planning a project. Rather, I think it references a posture, a way of being. Rest, with all of it’s dangerous seductiveness, must be avoided.
So what happened in Thailand? I let it go. I let go of the attitude of working, deeply, and now I don’t want to pick up that shroud of heavy energy again; that feeling of waiting to relax. If necessary, I will learn to relax simultaneously with “work”. Nevertheless, I do think location matters, and season matters. It matters because we are bodily. We walk this earth as creatures, and as creatures we rest and sleep and seek warmth.
So will I seek the warmth again next winter? I suspect I will, if it is at all possible for me, and this time I will go equipped with my oil paints, drying time be damned.