Mind The Gap

On having to stop

Good news! I will be speaking at TLC’s Being A Writer Festival in their ‘Wellbeing’ themed week on Tuesday 11th July. It’s a fully accessible, online festival and you can grab your ticket here, but I’m delighted to say that I have x3 FREE General Sale Full Festival Passes to give away (first come, first served). Act fast and use my coupon code BAE23GEORGE at the checkout and come hear me speak!

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I write from bed this week, propped up just a little. The cat is stretched long on the radiator, idly watching the magpies, and I have a steeping cup of Tulsi leaf tea. It’s been all stop here again these last few days. A more active week last week meant Friday arrived with a hard wall. 

These stops come hard and often and yet even now, they still catch me sharp. The handfuls of days I get when I’m able to manage a little more activity give me such a swoop of joy and hope that I don’t ever want to let them go, but they run out quickly, my body soon shutting down again in its mysterious, unfathomable way. Leaning into the stops like a free fall, in trust, with wisdom, is still something I am learning to do well. 

Being made to stop is deeply frightening. That’s the first challenge – the simple fear of it. While people rush in to tell me how well I manage overall, how much I achieve, how it is always OK to stop, I am left with a panicked smile. What looks to the world like success and stability on the outside is more often – financially and practically speaking – a case of desperately treading water, and most of the time I am only just managing to keep my head up. Life here is fragile, finely held together, and when the stops come and I feel the dragging, sinking pull of one again, it is hard not to feel frightened, even if it’s something I’ve experienced a thousand times before. Will this be the one? The stop that makes life disintegrate? I make myself remember that 'treading water' is just a metaphor and that there is actually real solid ground underneath to put my feet on, stop on, rest on. I CAN stop, yes. I have stopped before, time and time again and it always works out OK in the end. Even if I must let everything collapse around me for a bit, things are often more easily repaired than I imagine. 

I don’t think the stories we tell ourselves about time help us either. In my experience, time in real life does not work in the same way as it does in the stories of leisure, urgency or scarcity that we make up about it. It’s not that we simply have more or less time than we say we do or that going slowly wins the race in the end – it’s more fundamental than that. It’s that time itself is a mystery and so stopping and its effect on my life, finances, productivity or achievement can’t ever really be measured or predicted. I’m not sure time equals money, or health, or success or growth or anything else. If you think you understand time and can control or predict how it's best used, then I think you're probably kidding yourself. Better to throw up your hands at the whole unknowable business, I reckon, and to wait and see.

The next challenge comes from trying to hold back from immediately filling the space. However hard or short or long we must stop, we always race to try and fill that echoing gap of nothing with something, don’t we? Even I do it.

Here’s what I usually find myself filling the gap with:

• Words of self-recrimination, guilt and self-loathing 

• The kind of distraction that doesn’t really bring joy, just numbs

• Junk food

• Something I can buy online 

• Rumination and anxiety – a whole long tale about what’s going wrong

• A sad story about my past and my future

• Justifications and excuses – oh the arguments I deliver in my head to try and prove how worthy I really am!

• Some desperate kind of alternate achievement to show I’m not just being lazy

All very understandable, but absolutely none of them do me any good at all. Absolutely none of them help me to heal and get closer to those bright spark days again.

What does help – the only thing that does, really – is actually letting myself be blank. Nothing. Actually, truly stopped. Not clamouring to fill the gap in with anything much beyond perhaps a little reading, a little sewing, sitting outside, writing in my journal. True rest, not cleverly disguised self-destruction or over-thinking with my eyes closed.

It’s my biggest challenge of all: when I have to stop, can I show care and kindness to myself in a way that doesn't involve wallowing, self-sabotaging, reaching for yet another treat, or begging the world to affirm my self-worth? Anyone who thinks it’s easy should try it. It's like trying to hold something alive in your hands, something wriggling, wilful, and ironically full of energy. Stopping well is, at first, a kind of wrestling match. It takes trust, courage, a lot of resolve, but when you do it, when you really hold your seat and refuse to get pulled into ‘gap fillers’ – when you really let yourself be blank – after a while something gives. You can feel the release of it. The wriggling mass falls still. I believe that's when real healing comes. 

I am practising staying, "I am stopping. I have stopped. No big deal."

I am practising coming back to the simple here and now. My face on the pillow. The sun kissing my cheek. The beautifully honest, painful sensations in my body rising and falling like the sea. 

The wonder of it all is that after a while something does appear, quietly, in the gaps you leave, something all of its own. It arrives to fill you back up again. I’m not sure what to call it other than inspiration. Maybe it’s another type of love. 

The drip drip of inspiration that comes when you really, properly stop is different from what we expect to receive when we’re suffering, I think, and yet it’s one of the most valuable things that life gives us. It's a different way of being fed but I've learnt to have real trust in it. It comes as clear thoughts in the silence. Words. Images. Truths. Insight. Ideas. I am learning more and more to catch these drops on my tongue, take them seriously, let myself be nourished by them and encouraged by them. Even if they feel small and inconsequential at the time, they have a way of growing into something bigger. They are a part of what healing is, I think.

Impossibly, radically, I think every good thing in my life actually grows from these drops of inspiration when I’m sick and let myself truly, actually stop. All my best ideas, all my most powerful and authentic creative work, all my truest growth and healing. When the brighter days come again – and they do – it means I use them well. 

I have had to stop a thousand times and I will have to stop a thousand times again, but what if this isn’t a tragedy or an inconvenience at all? What if in each stop there might come the thoughts and seeds of the things that will truly define and heal my life?

This was a good thought to have today, that arrived drip drip drip in the silence. I wanted to share it with you.

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