I have been reacquainting myself with ‘The Basics’. I often end up thinking about them, these things that make up the scaffolding of my life. Because I am regularly and entirely undone, set back, stopped still, I have to return to their idea and their practicality over and over. It’s been a bad couple of weeks. Back to The Basics again, then.
There are some basics that are as predictable and dull as old carpet. I sit and write out a list of food. I shape that food into meals, like a potter returning to work after a long break, remembering that yes, this is how food is supposed to be and how it’s supposed to feel: good like this, whole. The day begins to find its nutritional rhythm again. I look up into the mirror, self-consciously touching and taming forgotten-about hair and skin, reaching for the dusty bottles on my dressing table. I make my bed. I mop up the spillage of whatever bad habits I’ve been feeding on, put things away, begin again.
What is interesting about the basics is that mine will not be the same as yours and even mine often change, shrinking and expanding. I must do a reassessment and be honest. It takes a lot of digging and discarding to find the pure essentials in the muddle of everything else that could be and should be done. But in the middle of awareness and trial and error and getting it all wrong, I do find them: these shining things that genuinely underpin my life. They are often surprising, sometimes annoying. “This? Really? Must I really do this?” Yes.
Writing is one for me. If I’m not forming words on the page each day, looping slowly across my journal, I begin to disintegrate. In coming back to that slow act, even just a few words scrawled whilst barely upright, I come back to myself. Much to my dismay, keeping my house clean seems to be A Basic too. I spent years denying it, but moving slowly, putting my hands to the surfaces and substances of my house and life, reading it like braille (“what do you need? what has changed?”), clearing, tidying, wiping, tending - I need to do it as fundamentally as I need to care for my own body and child. Returning to the basics always involves that too, then; divvying up the house into sections and needs that I can return to one at a time, even if my efforts are a token and incomplete at best. Just that rhythm of care, of returning to the goodness of things that are not me - “yes, this matters, you matter - this life of my mine, my home.” That is a basic to me.
Meditation, too. Ten minutes, no excuses. Back to it. Some days I hate how much it helps, how much I depend on it to stay feeling sane. Other days, returning, I weep as I sit, feeling something like bliss, so grateful to have this steady place to keep coming back to. The basic act of returning to sit outside for a few minutes has a similar, deeper effect.
Routine is another one that I both resent and cling to. I am undone without it, boneless, lost. The basics for me means orientating myself in time and that means dividing up the day again and sticking to strict timings. Clocks, timers, discipline. I guess some people would call it pacing. For me it’s more fundamental than that. It’s how I exist at all. It is in routine that achievement sneaks back, sly and steady, and then yes, I can see it: I’m living again. I really am.
There are other basics that are harder to pin down. Movement is one, but what movement is difficult to define. I often get it wrong here. Hurried by shoulds and my desire to be better, I push myself too much, too soon. One of the painful, grief-full aspects of The Basics is that they are often far smaller and less impressive than you’d hope they would be and they ask for your acceptance. And so I have struck ‘chair yoga’ and ‘Tai Chi’ off my list for now, and returned to the slow, five-minute lifting of arms and legs twice a day, on the floor or on my bed, according to a programme for the immobile elderly, my 40 year old face red. Still it is better than nothing. And that’s what the basics are, really: defiance, courage and resolve in the face of dissolving into nothing at all.
I think art-making might be another basic of mine, but I’m struggling to get that one right too. I layer my art-making with expectations and physical demand and that is no good for basics, especially in my body - the basics must be pure, achievable and free of complexity. Still, I know I feel more here when I have made some representational marks on the page, just something to mark the shifting world around me and to record something I’ve seen, something I’ve felt. It is another way of being concerned with something else that isn’t just my own pain. An offering. That is important to me. I shall just have to keep pruning it down until it is the right, small size, done in the right way, the same way I’ve done with everything else.
The basics are boring but, god, they are so good. There is such sweetness to them. And I think that’s what takes me by surprise most of all. That despite the grief of being perpetually knocked back and of all the things not done, I take real joy in these small returns. A return to seeing, caring, work. I love these things.
I think I treasure the basics because, for me, they aren’t just something to be endured for a couple of days before I return to a bright and busy life, they are my life. Knowing that the basics might be all I ever get makes me fiercely cherishing, selective. This is it: this is the life raft. What will I take and what will I leave behind?
There is a lapping, rocking peace in that. I am grateful for it.
Dear J, how I hear you on the routine: to hate and yet need and appreciate. How it's hard to distinguish between a groove and a rut. I'm more than twice your age, and much more physically able, yet we're still linked by these thoughts. I've outlived many friends, nearly all relatives, am alone very often, so there's a small degree of isolation in these thoughts, too. But I'm so grateful for your holy, yes, they are, words. Thank you.
“How we spend our days of course is how we live our lives” Annie Dillard