When we moved into our house, we inherited an all-caps sign on the back of the door that said “WHAT HAVE YOU FORGOTTEN?”
It was a big hit with almost everyone who visited us. People gave us all kinds of credit for this thing we didn’t make, said it was so funny and helpful, and remarked about how useful we must find it, how we must always have what we needed because of it. The thing is, we never really noticed it after the first few days. It was part of the scenery. Accordingly, we went on forgetting key items every time we left the house.
Several people have lately noticed and appreciated a list I taped to the kitchen wall titled “TAKE CARE OF YOUR BODY OR IT WILL BREAK.” By posting it in the kitchen, near the intersection of the pantry door, the key hook, the junk drawer, the heating vent, the bathroom, and the kitchen table, I thought I’d have a decent chance of seeing it, for a while at least. I did: I saw it for long enough to commit some of its tenets to medium-permanence habit.
It did do its job in that ONE of its many sections is now nearly rote for me (the bit on stretching), at least when I’m running a lot. Now, though I finished my training cycle and ran my race, the list is still up because a) people seem to enjoy it, b) I’m fond of it, the way you become fond of a shitty car that gets you places for a while, places that end up mattering to you.
Sometimes when I led bird walks I became aware that I was basically foaming at the mouth from the jostling of many distinct pieces of trivia trying to leap out of my brain first. I’d wipe away the spittle, force myself to pause, and remind the attendees that if they walked away with just ONE new bird ID or tidbit they’d remember, they were doing a GREAT job. I said that almost every time, some version of “hey, remember just one thing over a long period of time and you’ve done some powerful learning.”
I see how true this notion is in my daily life. For some reason, the things that are most crucial to my functioning are extremely hard not only to do, but also even to remember (take a shower, brush your teeth, go to bed for godsakes, etc.).
When I consider the growing list of helpful truths I’ve been “discovering” over and over for probably twenty years, I can see that almost every “lesson” boils down to a simple act that can help me regain a sense of groundedness, neutrality, and/or strength. They’re not about suddenly feeling happy, or becoming a different person, or changing the world. They’re about situating myself such that I can resume functioning—with all, or nearly all, my faculties. It’s a deeply basic, and surprisingly challenging, goal.
When you have two thirty-pound children crashing into your body and brain with their needs and desires throughout the day and night, you get a pretty clear picture of how stable (or unstable) your current stance is, physically and emotionally. If a tiny, poorly placed “high five” on your nose is enough to send you sprawling, you weren’t quite balanced in that leaning, twisting squat to direct a spoonful of yogurt into one kid’s messy maw while grabbing the nape of the other’s oversized shirt to keep him from throwing Dada’s phone. Likewise, if one whiny demand for a binky is enough to make you shout, you likely haven’t checked in lately with your sense of, say, everyone’s mortality and the size of the universe.
Imagine being in a literal and figurative boxing ring at the same time: at any given moment, how much of a hit would it take to dislodge your feet from the ground? And how well, how quickly and cleanly, would you be able to recover your balance?
I have lots of time to think about this while I stare at the dust bunnies (dust mastodons?) gathering under the furniture, wondering how I ended up down here again. In other words, the more time you spend knocked on your ass, the more opportunity you have to feel exactly what it’s like to be there, to figure out what caused you to be there, and to assemble a checklist for getting up without hitting your head on the table.
My husband, who is a commercial pilot, is at home with checklists. Pilots use them so often they (the lists, though perhaps also the pilots?) are in many ways synonymous with basic functioning. He has often wondered aloud why other fields don’t adopt similar codifications of their most effective practices. This generally prompts me to try and explain why they don’t (it’s more complicated than that? Most fields don’t have basic effective practices?) and, essentially, to fail to explain it. I’ve known few situations that couldn’t benefit from a list to consult—even if it’s only to decide that conventional wisdom and basic practices just won’t do in this case. Maybe most pursuits aren’t as clearly defined as aviation (keep plane in air, here’s how), but then again, a) aviation is NOT actually simple at all, b) at their core, most other pursuits CAN be expressed simply, and c) even if the content of the list fails to help, simply going through the act of “running” the checklist can return a person under duress to a sense of relative calm and agency—to basic functionality.
On the one hand, my practice of seeking a plain and neutral center, a well-oiled idle, rather than something happier or more exciting, may speak to my historical degree of decenteredness. On the other hand, it speaks to a learned efficiency: I can’t prevent my apple cart from turning over (just about everything has it out for apple carts, let me tell you), but I can get good at picking up apples. Some of mine—ones I’m constantly running around to recover as they roll over hill and dale—include: drink some water, talk to a friend, bake something, read something, go outside, breathe a couple times!, move your body.
They are so simple. That doesn’t mean they’re easy. In fact, it may be their very importance that makes them difficult to learn. Writing out your best practices, making a checklist for your current moment, can feel silly, especially if you seize upon the ones that really matter. That’s because they seem… too obvious.
But crucial and obvious aren’t the same thing. If important things really were that obvious, that clear to us, we wouldn’t be spending so much time and energy on less important things. [For example, the very first action I often engage in after waking, if a child isn’t crying, is to “check my phone.” The inanity of that phrase itself is enough to beg the question “WHYYYYY??” On the days when I manage to remember that I don’t actually care what’s on that screen, and rarely does anything good come of it being my first action of the day, I do something else, like finding comfy socks, or getting straight to what really matters (coffee). These “other” actions, ones that matter more, make me feel less like an automaton and more like a human, which is nice, maybe even helpful, given that it’s still dark out, and my days with twin toddlers tend to be about eighteen hours long, when measured in actual time (thirty-seven, when adjusted for emotional inflation).]
It’s an act of kindness—and maybe also revolution, in a society that profits from your dysfunction—to locate and articulate your needs, your requirements for functioning, and to identify the basic acts that help you meet them. Admittedly, it’s acutely nerdy (OR IS IT AWESOME, HM?), to write them down and hang them up on your wall, but think of it as giving yourself the chance to stare some realities in the eye for a while and, as my kids say, “SEE WHAT HAPPEN!”
And what does happen after that? Something, probably. But exactly what it is may turn out to be less important than the fact that you cared.