It’s a Thursday. I’m just getting home from work. I’ve had an exhausting day; my voice hurts, my head hurts. For the first evening all week, I have the option to have a free evening. My choices are to get home, rush to have dinner, and run out to the Buddhism class I’ve been skipping since January, or to enjoy one night of not rushing out and just relax. My headache and fatigue don’t motivate me to rush to make dinner and get out the door by 6:45, so I choose the latter. I settle into the couch, make a cappuccino and chill out before I do anything. I quickly check social media. Next thing I know an hour has gone by, my cappuccino is done and I’ve refreshed all my feeds mindlessly for no reason over and over for the past sixty minutes. Not wanting to waste my evening, I get up, start making dinner. My husband is staying late to play squash tonight so it’s all up to me. I cook, eat, clean, pack away lunches, and it’s time to walk Maple. I’m feeling pretty good by time I get home and I still have a few hours to relax before I start getting ready for bed.
So Maple and I snuggle up on the couch, ready for a great relaxation session, and…I pull out my phone. You see, I’m reading an e-book at the moment, and it’s on my phone, as much as I don’t like it. I realize I’ve mindlessly been scrolling without even remembering my intention to read. So I pull up the book. I get a few distracting notifications. I read a few pages. I’m back to texting or watching puppy videos. Ok, seriously, I’m getting back to relaxing. I hunker down again, but can’t focus on my book, and I don’t really have any other relaxing thing I’d like to do. Before I know it, it’s 9pm and I feel so drained from my so-called relaxing, restful, non-rushing night. I’m kicking myself for not making the best of it, for feeling like I’ve wasted the night. I could have done a workout, but didn’t. I saw a new recipe on Pinterest and now I’m fighting the urge to bake some gluten-free, vegan delicacy at 9pm when I should really just be getting ready for bed.
Unfortunately for me, I haven’t chosen my Buddhism class in a long while, and it would certainly be much more relaxing than what I’ve described above. I also know that this has been the reality of my past few Thursdays in a row. As I was reflecting upon this recently, I realized that I really don’t know how to relax. Most people, including me, associate the word relaxation with the imagery of a sandy beach, an ocean, all-you-can-drink and endless buffets, or maybe a week out at the cottage (or up at camp for any of the Northerners reading), enjoying the wilderness. I know my northern Ontario friends and family are much better at making wilderness relaxation a part of their regular life, but the rest of us typically do a cottage or a beach vacation once or twice a year at the most. With 52 weeks in a year, why is it that we only associate relaxation with that beach vacation or camping trip that MIGHT only happen on one or two of those weeks? What about the other weeks of the year? And days of the week other than weekends?
I’ve realized that I don’t actually have a definition of relaxation that coincides with my regular, normal, mundane life. I have a vision of relaxation that happens when I go to the beach, or if I sit outside on a summer day, reading a good paper book, or if I’m camping, but I don’t actually know what to do to relax on a daily basis, on a rainy day, a winter day, a Thursday evening after work, or even on my rest days on Sunday.
We live in such a distracted world that we can only do nothing if it involves being behind a screen. We need screens to get us through meals alone, quiet nights, even bathroom breaks and stop lights for some folks. If we can’t even do some of those things without distraction, then how can we possibly engage in relaxation without distraction?
If we want to really, truly relax, we need to learn how to define it for ourselves outside of those paradise images we typically associate with relaxation. We also need to learn to sit through the discomfort of silence and boredom. We need to get creative and use our imagination. We need to be mindful. We need to intend to relax in the most relaxing way possible, in other words, without technology.
Some things I associate relaxation with are: books, fires, my home, nature, meditation, walking, freedom from agendas, baking, drinking a nice coffee, silence, yoga, saunas, and self-care. The way I see relaxation would be similar to planning a retreat for myself and having an intention behind the relaxation. In this way, I can intentionally know how I would like my evening to go and not blowing hours being distracted. I’m going to give this a try next time I have some downtime and see if I can actually feel relaxed.
Do you know how to relax? Is it an intentional practice you have? If not, hopefully you can take something out of this and craft a relaxation program of your own.
And so it is.
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Because together, we rise.