Control and No Surprises
Control and no surprises. I keep thinking about these two things. Control and no surprises. Sort of the same thing, I suppose. But these were my answers when I asked myself why I can’t chill the fuck out. Hilarious.
When this year began, I noticed that I had fallen into my favourite pattern, one marked by busyness and ambition and that is really hard to decipher from honest passion. This is my addiction to momentum, to feeling like I had some semblance of control over the outcome of my days, and it sucked me back in again. Worse, I barely noticed.
I say again because I have been here once before. When the pandemic forced lockdowns and we all did the community thing which was isolate, I had just moved home from university months after dropping out, and I had just experienced two of the greatest losses I believe I will ever experience. I dropped out 6 weeks into my third year, on October 8, 2019, finding it difficult to discuss the issues of the world when the people I loved had succumbed to them, in one way or another. I remember the date only because I adopted my dog the day before. In retrospect, this was an impulsive time. Sue me.
So, what did I do? Before COVID hit, I continued to work full-time, living in my university town with no good reason to move home when I was employed in another city. Eventually, I found a shitty dog walking job in my hometown that couldn’t pay any bills, but I needed an excuse to leave Waterloo. So, I took it and moved into my childhood home.
I had been home for two and a half weeks before lockdown was announced, and my ability to go into people’s homes was pretty much eliminated. I was out of work for 4ish months, but I had the privilege of living with my parents, and had government stipends. So, in this time I had to figure out what to do with myself.
Before this, everything was so different. Having had nearly every moment of my life accounted for by school and work, I filled my spare moments with social time, gym sessions and the necessities of the day. I had no breathing room, it was fantastic. I didn’t have to think about my mom or my friend, and better yet, I didn’t have to feel the grief.
To the external world I probably seemed like I was coping well. I was making life decisions that were sudden but expected. Frankly, I regret none of them. But I was working with a packed schedule, and by the time I dropped out, I had found even more things to replace the pressure of university.
But in March of 2020 I was really fucked. I was with my family; I had no school or job. It was the first time I was without a task since before the eighth grade when I got my first job. Though I started college in September of 2020 (and re-enrolled in university, go figure), I had a few months to kill. From March to late June, I did fuck all. I worked out, sat in the sun, I spent time with my dogs. It was super uncomfortable because I had to exist in myself for the first time, probably ever. Eventually, I reveled in it.
I can’t imagine I’m alone in this discomfort; it’s probably the reason so many of us were stir crazy as the lockdowns extended for months. Anyways, this is just a really long and convoluted way of saying this was a lesson in rest, and I’ve forgotten the lesson since then.
By December of 2020, I had the entrepreneurial spirit that inspired me to start making small digital designs and I started selling them to my friends. I was back at school, I was working, and now I had a side hustle. The lessons learned in the month prior were starting to fade. But again, I hardly noticed.
I felt I had given myself ample time to grieve, I started therapy, I learned to feel my feelings and recognize them when they arrived. I learned to let the grief exist, and I befriended it as intimately as I could. But slowly I increased my workload, I moved, I expanded my small digital designs to markets and storefronts, I became addicted to making the art thing work. I still want to do that, don’t get me wrong. It just never occurred to me that the degree to which I leaned on these aspirations could have a negative impact on my ability to remain present for long enough to rest.
I felt excited and enjoyed the work I was doing; I filled my spare moments looking for opportunities. I still do this. I confused excitement for restoration, because sometimes they can be the same thing, but not always.
I’ve forgotten how to rest, most importantly rest my body and allowing my brain to be removed from the cycle of capitalism we simply weren’t designed for. I never attributed productivity to value, I believed it was solely ambition. But still, I have tension in my shoulders, my neck, my hips. I have trouble sleeping and I feel obligated to feed this dream of mine before all else.
I won’t complain about creation, because it has been a saviour to me, but I will explain that the process of creation and it’s inevitable doubt has me living with both the pressure to improve, and the doubt that anything will ever come from this. It’s possible I only get the journey, I think I’m fine with that. But my body, I suppose, isn’t. It can’t tell the difference between stressors, and so I simply hold tension.
For all this complaining, I want to provide some evidence of what I’m doing to pivot. I have made it my primary goal of 2025 to reduce the tension in my body, and this has come with a myriad of other goals that I didn’t expect. It now meant being in silence when I went to bed, because leaving the TV on, though it was providing the noise needed to avoid the anxiety, the light was fucking with my sleep. It has also meant checking in, saying hold on my body feels bad even if I didn’t want to admit it. It means addressing the tension. It’s also had me reflect on the weight that even acts of enjoyment can have on my wellbeing. Anything in excess can be trouble.
Now this is all whatever, I suppose. I just wanted to talk about the rest aspect, because I’ve stumbled on this epiphany that when I feel tension, whether that be physical or emotional, I lean on my ambitions to an unhealthy degree. I have denied myself the rest necessary to cope with tension, and to therefore show up to these ambitions in a way I’d like. Counter-productive.
So essentially, I’m saying I’ve been a sucker! I hadn’t noticed that activity was a response, not solely to a calling, but also a crutch for coping with dissatisfaction, grief, pain etc.
During my first lesson in Rest 101 back in 2020, I observed the way we use behaviours to self-medicate. I compared our behaviours to ibuprofen, a pill through which we address our pain. Meditation, being a progressive technique, is a positive form of medicine, at least most of the time. Avoidance on the other end would be a perversion of its intent. Isn’t that funny! How we behave out of response to our wounds, yet only sometimes do we properly dress them.
I’m having to look at my toolkit right now, to see what the intentions are for most of my actions, where do they come from, what are they calling to? Rest feels like a medicine I need right now, and it is tackling these other forms of medication that I have been using without script.
So ambition, all these goals, all these pressures have been about control and no surprises. I’ve built what I can draw reference from, I’ve stacked the proverbial deck. Control. The outcomes have been limited to what I’ve allowed possible. No surprises. I left no room for active living, but more important, active restoration. Because things like anxiety and dread like to come in idle time, I rid myself of the possibility of it’s arrival and mistook this for refuge.
A while ago I wrote about the anecdote about being stuck in the tree even after no longer needing to climb it. Surprise, surprise, I’m still there. But life is about remembering and forgetting, and I think I’m starting to remember how to get down.