Paying Attention

This is the first month of my happiness project, and I decided to follow Gretchen Rubin’s lead by choosing energy as a theme, hoping that the results will bleed into the rest of the year.

I already have the exercise aspect handled, so I won’t go into that (though if you are doing this project too and don’t exercise, I would highly recommend tackling that first). I am approaching energy in several ways, including going to bed earlier, cutting out caffeine and alcohol (for the most part – I can’t quite give up that Saturday night glass of wine), drinking more water, going vegetarian, and making my super-green-super-clean-super-healthy smoothies every morning. I must admit I have a bit of an obsession with my green smoothies. While I was going through chemo I never felt like eating breakfast, so I would sip on a smoothie packed with berries, spinach and kale (the berries overwhelm the kale flavour, I swear). Then for a while, out of laziness, I abandoned the smoothies, but I always felt strangely guilty about it. My blender sat empty and accusingly on the counter. I felt as if, somehow, the consumption of blended green goodness was my vanguard against a relapse.

Of course, while I know that green smoothies will likely not be the thing that makes or breaks my health, they do deliver a pretty strong punch of nutrients and healthy energy, and they give me an extra serving of greens that I would otherwise not have (because really, who wants spinach or kale for breakfast?). And a body recovering from chemo needs all the nutrients it can get. So I’m back on the smoothie train.

Another thing I am especially focused on to clear my brain and improve my energy is clutter. I find mess and clutter to be extremely draining, and I cannot relax in a messy house.

The problem with this is that I am terrible about putting things away. I take a week to unpack a suitcase, choosing instead to live out of it until it sort of unpacks itself. I do the same thing with clean laundry. I leave clothes and papers and books lying around everywhere. But I hate it when things are lying around everywhere. Clutter makes me crazy, though I have this irritating tendency to create it. I am certainly not the only one at fault – my children are mess makers, as children usually are, and my husband has a knack for scattering mail and bills and magazines on any available flat surface. But as the adult who spends the most time at home, I am by default the main “house keeper,” and so the clutter control falls to me.

But what to do? I am not by nature a tidy person, but I love it when things are tidy. My solution is usually to cram anything into a drawer, any drawer, so that I at least don’t have to look at it. This results, obviously, in crammed and messy drawers that make me nearly cry with despair every time I open them.

And then, in the shower one morning, I grasped the very obvious solution. Mindfulness. I simply must pay more attention. You see, I am a fairly absent-minded person. In fact, while I was doing my PhD, my husband used to claim that I was the perfect “absent minded professor.” I realize now that I am messy because I ignore things, I don’t pay attention, and I don’t put things where they belong. So, instead of walking past that pile of clothes six times in one day, I shall take the five minutes and put it away. Instead of lamenting that my kids’ gloves and boots are all over the hall, I will quietly (and cheerfully, of course) put them away. Or better yet, I will enlist them in the task. Gretchen Rubin refers to this, in part, as her one-minute rule. If something will take less than one minute to complete, she’ll do it right away. To this I’ve added my two-minute rule. If I have a two-minute pause where I’m doing nothing, I quickly gather up things and put them where they belong. I don’t have big chunks of time throughout the day, but I have certainly have two minute windows. My house is not pristine after these efforts, but I can attest that it is certainly less messy.

I also did a trip to Ikea and stocked up on baskets and various boxes to organize our avalanche of belongings. It is mid-January and I still haven’t actually organized any closets, but it’s coming, I’m sure of it. Maybe I’ll tackle a closet right after I write this. Maybe.

Finally, I’ve taken Rubin’s advice to “act the way I want to feel.” That is, when I’m feeling tired in the early afternoon but still need to entertain my kids, instead of lying amidst the Duplo mumbling “I’m so tired,” I’ll do something especially energetic, like taking them outside or building a fort of blankets. This seems counter-intuitive, but it really does work. The activity requires me to wake up, I have more fun, and in the end I’m less tired than if I had lain on the couch inventing games that don’t require movement.

So, with all of these changes, am I remarkably more energetic? Well, I am doing more, so I’m having more fun, but I am expending more energy. I haven’t quite found the right balance. I was complaining to a friend recently that I had been super tired this week, right after telling her that I had just added two more runs per week and had run 11 kilometres that day. She looked at me quizzically: “You don’t have a very good gauge of when to stop, do you?”

I don’t. I never have. But I’m working on it.