How Are You

So, I had this bath the other night.  Not just any old bath (not that I take them often), but... really... I think it will be known as The Bath in my mind forever.

My dear friend Jill from New York sent me a care package awhile ago consisting of some girly stuff.. a funny book, a healing salve, and a little brown box with kind of artsty stamps on it, tied on the top with sealing wax, and labeled as containing bath salts.  I played with the other stuff, and put the little brown box away for later, because I just don't really take baths that often.

The other day I decided to open up the box to at least see what was in it.  It was filled with straw packing and then a beautiful frosted jar with a label on it: Wild rose and goats milk bath salt -- consisting of Dead Sea salt, epsom salt, pink himalyan salt, goat's milk (WTF?), wild rose, glycerine and essential oils.  It also proclaimed itself to be "wildcrafted and organic."

Opening up the jar, I see that this is some seriously cool shit.  Huge salt crystals, kind of glopped together with oils and the goats milk, with actual buds of roses thrown in for good measure.  It smelled wonderful.

So I gave it a try the other night.  Roger was asleep, so I did the whole deal... a candle, soft lighting, closed the door, gave myself up to some personal indulgence.  And as I slipped into the water, I realized how absolutely crazy it is to not do this more frequently.  My poor beleaguered cut/poked/inserted/extracted/infused/expanded/subtracted/medicated body felt better than it has since the surgery.  It was so simple!  And so rare.

And it was the rarity that made me start thinking.

"Self care" is usually thought of as trying to squeeze in time to get to the gym, or the spa, or Whole Foods, or something else in the middle of taking care of the job, the kids, the husband, the parent, the house, the dog, the cat, the stranger on the street, or basically anyone else who steps up to our counter and takes a number.  Once everyone's needs are dealt with, then we take the last number and try to squeeze in whatever we can at 11:30 at night, or 5:30 in the morning.

Or we get militant about it.  This is Me time we proclaim, as we screech out of the driveway, burning rubber down the road, to make our mani/pedi appointment goddamn it and everyone can go fuck themselves if they try to get in the way.  We burn ourselves out to a point where we are about to go all Howard Beale on the world, and then we take some Me time with our middle fingers up and while guilt and rage seethe through our bodies.

I am sure there are people who have figured out how to balance these extremes.  This is personally a challenge for me.  And laying there in the warm water, the goats milk and epsom salts gently seeking entry points into my skin, I realized that this may be what this whole breast cancer thing is all about for me:  How to figure out, truly, how to take care of myself in a way that is balanced and harmonious and healthy on all levels.

I failed immediately, of course.  I had two busy days this week, between my son's graduation and some work related stuff I got involved with yesterday.  After work, I also spent a good hour purely socializing with a group of co-workers, making it two full days in a row, out in the world being almost normal.

Well, the chemo/cancer gods did not like this so well.  Or I had a reaction to this white blood cell count boosting injection that they gave me on Wednesday.  Whatever it was, the fist of an angry motherfucking god came down on me last night with a vengeance.  I was reduced to absolute paralyzed pain, every bone aching and my head splitting open with a migraine-sized headache as big as I've ever felt.  I could not move, I could not think, I could not even whimper without hurting more.


I finally took some ibuprofen PM last night, slept solidly for a few hours, and then took something stronger this morning when the headache was starting to get cranked up again.  And while I was laying there, waiting with teeth clenched for the new meds to kick in, I had a thought.

This whole idea of taking care of oneself kind of implies that we know how we are feeling before a hammer strikes us on the head and smites us down to our knees.  Right?  In theory, I should have known when to leave the social event before I overdid it.  In practice, however, I don't really know when too much is too much until I'm clobbered and slink away into the corner to lick my self-inflicted wounds.

Is this just me?  I wonder how many people actually know how they are feeling.

I also started thinking of the phrase "how are you?"  It's not "What are you doing?"  It's "how are you being?" As Roger says frequently in his teaching, we are human beings, not human doings.  We ask ourselves and others how we are... but do we really know the answer?

In the hospital, they always ask what your pain level is on a scale of one to ten.  They provide a whole chart of how to assess this -- from happy to crying faces, to verbal descriptions -- to help people assess accurately how their pain level is.  Too bad we don't have charts to help us know what our other levels are.  How fulfilled is your soul today?  How mentally vibrant do you feel today?  What is your body telling you today energetically, emotionally?  How creatively inspired are you today?

I don't know if we know how to assess these things.  I sure don't.  It feels like I just go off on tangents waiting to hit another bumper car of obstacle, or I get so pent up that I give everyone that old middle finger again and run off to Starbucks to write for an hour.  It's so ... random. It's so lacking in true information.

Being vs doing.  As I explore these things I think the answer is out there, but that it doesn't have to do with more lists of things to do.  I don't think it has to do with better time management.  I think it is truly, deeply, more fundamental than that.  I think it's a way of being in our lives and finding a sense of balance and harmony from the inside out.  So that we know when we are depleted creatively, or we know when it's time to shift gears from work mode and go bicycling.  So that we know how we actually are, on multiple scales, and can then chart our courses accordingly.