Using Pain to Improve Life

Since my last post my life has taken a turn for the unexpected. I developed a literal pain in the butt that extends from the cheek down to the calf. Ouch!! Boy does it hurt. Hurts to sit, stand, and walk, which leaves lying down, but I can’t afford to do that all day, so I sit, stand, and walk, wincing (gasping) all the way.

After checking to ensure that a pinched nerve or my back isn't somehow involved, my doctor prescribed a powerful anti-inflammatory and some exercises. There’s no quick fix for this, and the pain wears me down by the end of the day. The silver lining is that I’m using the pain as motivation to work on some areas in my life. 

First, I figure that the body has an enormous capacity to heal itself as long as it’s not sabotaged. I’m helping by eating as healthily as I know how, with plenty of food high in antioxidants and anti-inflammatory properties. Guided by George Mateljan’s The World’s Healthiest Foods, an “essential guide for the healthiest way of eating,” I am learning the health properties of different foods and the best way to select, store, prepare, and cook them. 

Anti-inflammatory foods and herbs include salmon, tuna, and shellfish, pineapples, papayas, olives, garlic, ginger, and turmeric. There are others, but that’s where I’m starting. Yesterday for lunch Kat and I ate avocado halves sprinkled with lemon juice and stuffed with tuna salad (a recipe from the book). Tasty! 

Second, having this grinding, relentless pain actually helps with my mindfulness practice. Sometimes the pain overwhelms, and I have to stop and just breathe deeply. I try to follow the advice in the book to focus on breath and welcome any discomfort or pain instead of fighting it. It’s not easy, and it doesn’t always help, but most of the time it seems to. It keeps me from panicking anyway. Anxiety magnifies pain, and to the extent that mindfulness practice diffuses anxiety, it helps.

Third, I am forced to practice patience. Not a virtue of mine, but one I want to cultivate. The healing process takes time. I can eat all the right foods, exercise diligently, and take my meds, but I can’t force the pain away or hurry the healing process.  Impatience — when will this pain end? — like anxiety, just makes it worse. 

So there it is. I wrote most of this while standing at our kitchen island, and finished it off sitting at my desk. My new life for a while. I hope that when this chapter of life draws to a close, I will have acquired or deepened a few good habits.

Breaking Rules and Re-visiting Goals

Just back from a whirlwind visit home (near Houston) to visit my folks. The trip is exactly three hours and twenty minutes from my door to theirs. Most of the time I have to make a pit stop along the way. When I take Dobby, I stop off at a rest area so I can take him with me into the restroom.

I pulled into a rest area as usual and for the first time noticed a sign that clearly stated “No Pets Allowed in Restroom.” What?? But I can’t leave him in the car! What if he were stolen? And during summer months the car interior heats up far too quickly. Impossible to leave an animal in a car, even with the windows cracked. I might have to disguise him as a human baby and carry him in a pouch. Think it will work?

Time to check in with April goals:

Create a routine, writing at least three hours every (work) day. Still no routine, but I did manage the floating three hour period on days I wasn't on the road, plus more on occasion.

Close e-mail during writing sessions. Yup. 

Close internet during writing sessions, or use internet blocking or my alphasmart. Nope. The internet is like chocolate to me - irresistible. I cannot bring myself to use an internet blocking program; I don’t know why I even wrote that down. I haven’t yet unearthed my alphasmart. I really like typing on my laptop. A lot. And I use Scrivener. Though I know I can transfer my alphasmart stuff to Scrivener, I like working in Scrivener. So, I’ll have to figure this one out. I suppose if I’m hitting my writing goals (I’m now into daily word counts for my fiction), I can ease up on this one.

Practice mindfulness. I googled for some resources and came up with a bewildering number of books and blogs about mindfulness. Finally I downloaded Mindfulness for Dummies to my Kindle, figuring it would give me the basics. So far I like what I’m reading, but I’ve only just begun putting it into practice (as in yesterday). I plan to review this more fully in a future post.

I will now turn these goals into May goals. They’ve been helpful, and I want more time with them. 

Distraction Busters

I am sitting at my desk, fingers flying across the keyboard, while I watch out the front window at workmen in our neighbor’s yard. Two of the men are digging a hole. Why are they digging a hole? They are digging in the side yard near the street. Something to do with the water?

Dobby - A Cute Distraction

My dog is napping on my lap, making it somewhat difficult to type. I glance at the time. I want to beat the crowds to the grocery store. With guests arriving Monday, I have a largish shopping trip planned. Fortunately, San Antonians don’t seem to grocery shop much before 11:00 on a Saturday morning. Everyone has a sleep-in.

This is how my morning writing session is going, unconnected wonderings and worries interspersed with moments of actual work.

Distractions nip at me constantly. An inevitable part of the writing life I suppose. I don’t think I handle them very well. I’ve written that a life goal of mine is to attain a feeling of wholeness. I dislike feeling scattered, and this constant succumbing to distractions contributes to that feeling. 

 I want to blame external factors for this inability to sit still, to focus, to feel integrated. Aside from musing-type distractions (staring out the window), there are distractions that willpower won’t make go away. Family members like to visit for a couple of days at a time, and I like to have them, but the bed and breakfast times can disrupt an entire week — cleaning, meal planning, shopping, and the visit itself.  I have too many volunteer commitments, with lunch and evening meetings. Even one meeting in the day can make the whole day feel disrupted. Home care, cooking, the dogs, the bills. Really it’s no more than others have to contend with, and less than most. But they’re MY distractions, and I’ve got to learn to integrate them into a good, creative life, because they’re not going away.

The root of the problem is internal. A resistance to the work that I know from experience will melt away as soon as I sit down and let myself fall into it. So today I am going to list distraction-busting practices for the month of April, and re-visit them on May 1 to see how I’ve done.

• Create a routine:  This is a biggie. I have tried for years, without much success, to have a set, daily routine. Largely because of Kat’s second-shift schedule, my best writing time is between about 8:00 and 9:00 am, and then early afternoon, like between 1:00 and 3:00, and then again for a couple of hours in the evening. With meetings popping up here and there, mostly in the evening, and family visits, and Kat’s weird days off, I stick to this routine maybe two days of any given week. So, I will practice getting in three hours of writing every day, regardless of the ‘when,’ though I will try for that morning and early afternoon rhythm.  That’s my practice goal for April. A separate, long-term goal will be to set my writing times/days, and not accept volunteer commitments that conflict with those times. (This has to be long-term as some of my commitments run to the end of 2014). 

•  Keep my e-mail closed while writing.

• Keep my internet browsers closed while writing. We’ll see how this one goes. If it costs too much in willpower, I can either check out one of those internet blocking programs or write on my Alphasmart. 

• Practice mindfulness meditation.

I can think of others, but this is enough to start with.

It’s coming up on 3:00 now, and time to take Dobby — my little white ball of energy — on his walk. I feel good because I can count this as a successful writing day, and I have no meeting tonight, so I plan to get some fiction writing done. (That’s right. I have nowhere to be on a Saturday night! It’s ok because our Saturday is Monday. The life of shift work).

Postscript:  The men across the street are installing a sprinkler system. It looks like an archeological dig over there. Watching other people do manual labor makes for an almost irresistible distraction! Lucky for me they should finish today.