Time to digest

"Everyday reveals the cold power of core values."

(Jolanta Brach-Czaina)

“What a nice hair tie you have, Dori,” I told my daughter. "Who did you get it from?"

"From you," she said in Princess Elsa's icy voice and I could read in her eyes that I had just crossed the line. As we say in Czech, the milk has overflowed.

I immediately started apologizing and explaining that something must have happened to my memory. It's getting harder and harder for me to remember names, places, I always have to write everything down, I easily forget what someone says to me, what I promise to someone, and now I see that I'm also forgetting Christmas presents.

"I think it's because you always gobble everything up so quickly," Dori replied.

I burst out laughing. I knew exactly what she meant. Every time we eat together, me and my two daughters, they don't even start and I'm already done. When we buy an ice cream, the moment we find an empty bench, I'm already biting the cone while they're just having the first lick.

I didn't quite get the connection between food and memory, but I just thought it was funny. And when Dori saw how she had amused me with her joke, she seemed to forgive me.

Reflection and digestion

A few days later I had a meeting with my supervisor, Rocio, to go over the current adjustments to my professional career. When we talked about the changes I had already made or was about to make, it became clear that I was generally looking for more space for reflection.

I thanked her, left the Zoom meeting, closed the computer, put on my shoes and went to "reflect" a little on this beautiful supervision process to "walk the talk" we had with Rocio.

After a few meters, I repeated my daughter's sentence again: "You always gobble everything up so quickly."

Wow. She actually made a great metaphor! Yes, I definitely eat fast, but I also leave little room for digestion. Every day I am immersed in so many different events that I sometimes lack time to process them. I'm just gobbling it up. Both the food and the experience.

In my psychotherapy work, together with my colleagues, we try to make reflections natural part of every network meeting and we try to leave enough room for these reflective talks. We turn to each other, share our thoughts and feelings with just each other, the family listens, and then we invite them to share what was going through their minds as we talked about what they were talking about. With this meta level, we slow down the whole process and give everyone more space to "digest".

Then, when the meeting is over and the family (or other network of loved ones) leaves, the colleague and I stay for a few minutes to savor the good feelings, shake off the bad ones, and give each other feedback. And even after that, when I'm alone, riding a bike, lying on the ground or sitting in a tram, I have an internal dialogue with myself, which is no longer directly related to the family in question, but rather to my work in general. And it can eventually result in writing something like this blog post.

So... I actually have a lot of opportunities for reflection, you could say...

Normal digestion

But my life does not only consist of therapy sessions. I also sleep, shower, clean my apartment, scan documents, wash dishes, ride my bike, chat with friends, write messages, prepare food, shop, play with the kids, browse Facebook, write this blog, read a book, talk on the phone with my parents, walk, exercise...

I am used to considering these activities as something routine, automatic, which does not require special attention. Usually I try to combine with i.e. thinking about something that I need to solve, decide or plan.

But there is another perspective...

I recently discovered the Polish philosopher Jolanta Brach-Czaina. In her wonderful book The Cracks of Existence, which I have just finished, she claims that these activities are not meaningless at all! Rather, they are one of the "cracks" from which we can learn something interesting and important about our existence. The book was apparently not translated to English so I offer my own translation of a short passage from the book - it deals with cleaning up the room:

"When I pick up the scattered objects, I take the side of order against the destruction seen outside, but at the same time I put on a mask and accept a role in the drama that is unfolding here. Thanks to this, I can hide the inner chaos from myself and forget about it for a while."

It may sound a little strange to philosophize about cleaning in this way, but after reading it, I realized that there really is no reason to put extraordinary experiences (like the networking meetings described) so much above the normal routine. In other words, I tend to focus only on exceptional events - important dialogues, decisions, negotiations, celebrations, visits to extraordinary places etc., but I limit the importance of routine activities to a minimum. I ignore them. As Brach-Czaina writes:

"Everyday life is built from disappearing gestures, disappearing problems, from plans that lose meaning as soon as they are carried out. It is an effort that is closed by the nothingness adjacent to it."

A significant part of our life thus disappears into nothingness from this point of view. At the same time, it does not deserves much to prevent this from happening. A look into nothingness, however brief, makes it less "nothing" and if we pause in it for a moment, from "nothing" becomes "something".

Experiencing everything

When my daughter said I gobble everything up so quickly, she wasn't referring to any special food. She meant everyday food. Breakfast, dinner, ice cream.

If I have a special food, I usually don't eat it fast. I tend to eat it sparingly, slowly, savoring it. But with regular, everyday food, it's true. I'm in a hurry.

However, we all know that it is healthy to eat slowly and give your digestive system enough time to process it. And our esophagus, stomach and intestines do not differentiate between festive lunches and afternoon snacks.

Could this also apply to the nervous system and the mind (which in my worldview is not a separate system, but rather floats somewhere between systems)? In addition to extraordinary events, shouldn't we also pay attention to very common, routine things?

It's a nice idea, of course, but if I were to approach my routines the way Jolanta Brach-Czaina suggests, the time it would take to execute them would most likely double. And I rather need to shorten these activities. Where else should I save time, if not on a boring routine?

Difficult question. But it's summer and the summer holidays are perfect for experimenting with this new perspective. I have already completed my experiment. It ran out well. I was mindfully aware of every step on my way to the breakfast room, noticing every piece of movement of the clouds in the sky merging with the sea level, felt every millimeter of skin as I slathered my daughters in sunscreen, together we carefully considered whether to have ice cream now or later and how many degrees do we turn the air conditioner on. And I constantly reflected on everything (the daughters sometimes joined in, but they are not so much into it :-).

I just don't know if it helped me remember what I'm giving anyone for Christmas next time...