How to Trick Yourself into Relaxing

I feel so clever.  I've tricked myself into being very throroughly relaxed.  And You Can TOO!

Here's how you do it:

1. Get diagnosed with a life threatening disease with a very long and arduous treatment regimen.
2. Undergo enough of the long and arduous treatment regimen to have a good sense of when you are going to feel like a green rotting corpse.
3. Understand that on the days that you will feel like a green rotting corpse, you probably should not plan to work, socialize, clean the house, do errands, or otherwise be in any way productive.
4. Clear your schedule accordingly.

Here's where the beauty part comes in.  IF, by extraordinary luck (or an accidental combination of a perfect cocktail of medication that miraculously enables you NOT to feel like a green rotting corpse on the days that you've anticipated feeling like a green rotting corpse) you feel pretty good on those days... voila!  You have an ENTIRE DAY FREE.

It's the best plan ever and I feel so wickedly clever for stumbling upon it.  Here I am... after a night in which, indeed, I really did feel one foot in the grave, cursing my life and watching each second hand crawl across the clock face, tormenting me with the painful length of the passage of time... and I'm supposed to feel crappy.  And I MIGHT feel crappy in a bit.  But right now... I don't!  And I haven't all day.  (Relatively speaking of course.)

Here's how good I felt this morning (aside from the fatigue and body aches and flushes of heat and cold, etc.):  I felt so good that I started cleaning the house.  And I felt so good cleaning the house that I even indulged in a Fantasy of Health... what I would do if I actually were feeling truly great in my body.  I would clean the house, and get my stuff in order, and then I'd go to Jersey Mike's around noon and get myself a mini Italian sub (Mike's style), and a Diet Coke (very cold), and then I'd take that picnic lunch and my old beach bag and my old orange boogie board and my (in my fantasy) new bathing suit that actually fits on my (in more of my new fantasy) intact body and my (probably actually realistic) wet suit that  may actually fit me again and not make me look like a big black rubber sausage... and I'd drive to the beach (with no traffic, because this is a fantasy beyond all possible reality at this point), and then I'd find a parking space (why the fuck not) and then I'd boogie board in the fresh clean sparkling effervescent wondrousness of the Pacific ocean, feeling 1000% alive and free and whole and healthy and just exploding with vibrancy and vitality.  And I'd do that for a couple of hours, taking a break to eat my picnic, and then I'd come back home feeling like I'd just spent six weeks in Bali being cared for by native servants and massaged with fragrant oils and relaxed and whole and happy in every molecule of my body.

That was how good I felt; good enough to envision all that.  And while I envisioned all that, I did a little work around the house.  And while I did that, I realized how long it'd been since I'd had my weekly Saturday ritual.  When I was growing up, my mom would always leave me a list of all the things I had to do before I could do anything else on the weekend.  And, of course, that list became the source of endless hours of therapy sessions because it totally fed into my OCD and became this tyrannical THING that always had to be serviced before anything else could be done -- and yes, we know all about this yadda yadda -- but... really... in a weird way I kind of liked the list.  Because when it was done... it was DONE.  Finito.  List crossed off  = guilt-free freedom.  Yes, you could say I would probably have been better off without the indoctrination to always finish the list, but... really... I'll give you the name of my therapist and you guys can chat about it.  It is what it is.

Anyway.  I did my own little walk around my perimeters this morning.  I watered the plants in back.  I swept the floors.  I cleaned the kitchen a little bit.  (And I even left the floors for Roger who absolutely INSISTED on doing it himself.. because I'm turning him into a freak of nature like me... but give me brownie points for letting him do it.).  And then I balanced my checkbooks and paid the bills and squared away my bookkeeping.  And.. then... it was time for lunch!  Miracle.  It wasn't Monday afternoon.  It wasn't midnight.  It was lunch time.  And I still felt good, and I'd gotten what I wanted to get done.  And my house is clean and my money in order.  What else was there to do?

NOTHING.

Nothing.  There was nothing left to do but make myself something to eat.  Finish off the last episode of House of Cards.  And... then what?

Dare I say it?  I'm relaxed.  I do have to do my taxes but (see "planning for feeling like a green rotting corpse," above) I already have carved out tomorrow to be utterly free as well.  I can do my taxes tomorrow.  And in between then I can plan out maybe a dinner to make, and write this little blog.

OK.  I know I'm a dip shit.  This is so obvious.  But I'm going to write it down anyway.  Because, really?  I don't think we do this all that much.  Give ourselves MORE time to do something than it will actually take?  Give ourselves a day without external commitments?  I don't at any rate.  I pack my shit in (as I've said) like I pack the back of a truck.  Every spare moment artfully and completely utilized.  No wiggle room for unwanted slop and waste.  Efficient, compact, wall-to-wall time absorption.  It's a beautiful thing... and many of us are very adept at it... but... it... actually kind of makes for a sucky kind of life.

I'm finding this out with work as well.  For long reasons that you don't really want to hear from me, because I have a basically whiny and ungrateful attitude about it, I am now working part time and being paid by the hour.  I hate this, but I'm learning something about myself in the process (hmmm... now there's a theme).

And what I've learned is this:  When you are compelled to actually stop working... and actually DO stop working.. well, then... you don't have to work.

I know you're all laughing at me.  But this is kind of a new idea.  I'm a salaried employee, and I work long volunteer hours for my beloved/beleaguered opera company, and I give of myself relentlessly, and (really) my usual inner monologue goes something like this:  "Let's just work until we drop, shall we?"  And that's about the extent of my limits and boundaries with regards to working hours.

But now that I'm working hourly, and have a bad attitude about it, I am fully able to turn things off mid-sentence at the end of my allotted hours and start doing a "Quittin' time!"  happy dance inside, and then go off and do other things.

And you know what?  I can do this.  It works.  I'm done.  I don't give it another thought.

So, for those of you who are plagued by The List and don't know how to do this any better than I do (and for my own specificity as well)... here's a start at how to trick yourself into relaxing once in awhile:

1. Make sure you book your activities to actually take less time than you have available.
2. If you can't do that, don't book yourself into more activities than you actually have time for.  (You will have already failed at tricking yourself into relaxing, but at least you may be able to avoid tricking yourself into a neurotic stressed out breakdown.)
3. Leave significant margins.  If Mapquest says it will take you 18 minutes to get across town in current traffic, go wild with yourself and give yourself 30 minutes.  I know that's crazy talk, but if you do happen to get there 12 whole minutes early, you can check your email or catch up on messages, or even just look around and breathe for awhile.  C'mon...12 minutes... it won't kill you and what else could you get done in that amount of time?  (And besides, Mapquest is invariably wrong and then you'll be right on time anyway.)
4. Be your own boss: literally.  Here's a fantasy: what if you really liked your boss?  What if you really wanted your boss to be happy, and to succeed, so you could get a raise and be happy and successful yourself?  What if your job was to go around making sure that your boss was really well taken care of at all times, so that she (or he) could really be effective in the world?  Now: what if YOU were doing that for yourself?  Would you book your boss into meetings that she couldn't possible get to without popping an aneurysm?  Would you book your boss's schedule so that she was so stressed out she'd take it all out on YOU?  Like, think about this.  You don't want to take it all out on yourself.  You need to be your own best advocate.  You are not industrial machinery.  It is not "let's work till we drop and then see what happens" time.  

Consider finding relief in your own life.  Consider constructing a life that you like to live in, so you don't always have to escape it in order to get a breather.  What if a day at home actually could feel like a vacation... with room to contemplate some new menus to cook, or a new blog to write?  Or the option to take a nap or watch TV, guilt free?  I don't think we need to come up with life threatening diseases in order to grasp the concept of an actually empty calendar day, without time pressures and commitments. 

Maybe I'm just kind of delirious because I don't feel like crap (and I've got handsful of medications, both toxic and anti-toxic) coursing through my blood stream.  But... it's a thought that I'm going to pursue.  Infrastructure Saturdays.  Days in which the whole day can be spent at home doing things to make order and catch up and look around and in which to catch my breath.  Not with lists that can't be accomplished in sixteen hours, but with simple things, grounding things, things that will make me feel better in my home and in my body and in my soul.

It's a trick, granted.  But worth a shot.