Wide Awake
What if everything you've labeled as a weakness is actually a signal?
I’m not advocating for a “slow life,” per se (or maybe I am). If your life looks anything like mine, we have stuff to do. To-do lists are half a page long and are categorized by areas of responsibility: personal/work/home. Google Calendar looks like a toddler went crazy with a box of crayons. Executive-level schedule syncs with my husband weekly (trying to get better about doing this on Sunday evenings and not over a mid-week dinner). It’s not that I enjoy being type-A, really, but my life demands it. We are women who are wide-awake to the life we are building, and it is wonderfully rich and overwhelmingly full.
And yet. No matter how meticulously we organize our homes, scroll through Pinterest boards with inspiring quotes, or do whatever makes us feel like we are living aspirationally for a few minutes, there is still an undercurrent of dissonant feeling that, like the great David Byrne once sang, finds its way into our most private thoughts:
“And you may find yourself in a beautiful house, with a beautiful wife/And you may ask yourself, ‘Well… how did I get here?’”
As a representative of the oldest generation of Millennials (hi, welcome, we play bingo at 2pm), I’ve felt some of the disappointment of the so-called Great Millennial Career Crisis and I’ve certainly had my moments of anger and frustration that we were sold a time-share of false promises (even within the church, but that’s a conversation for another day). I’m over the word “intentional” because it’s become a meme–the crunchy, gentle parenting mom, quietly crying as she packs a gluten-free bento box for little Apple’s forest school lunch. But what else do I mean by this? It’s more than intentionality, more than putting effort into something and hoping the universe responds with kindness (lol, good luck). You’re not weak, or failing, or whatever lie has taken root in your heart–this feeling that your life is not working, that the treadmill is speeding up, or, like your poor back after a night of bad sleep, something is just off…this is an important signal.
I’m convinced that our bodies will often tell us the truth before our minds and hearts are caught up. In my late-thirties, I was working full-time in a high-pressure job that was remote (with travel), while also managing a house and raising three young sons. I worked (and lived) in a high-rpm mode for a long time until I started noticing physical symptoms that I’d never dealt with before: most mornings, I would wake to a sore jaw and dull headache. The tension became worse, and I started dealing with insomnia, going to sleep at my normal time, but waking up around 2 or 3 am and not being able to fall back asleep for a couple of hours. These symptoms compounded and started to affect my entire life–my creativity and ability to show up for my team, my ability to rest and recuperate, and most importantly, they were affecting my marriage and family life.
This was the moment that got my attention–I couldn’t “power through” this season as I’d done before, no, I needed to take a step back and really assess what was happening. I needed to get immediate help for the physical symptoms I was facing, but I also needed to be honest about what choices I was making for my life. What was most important to me? Was I building my life in a way that actually upheld those priorities, or was I getting caught up in the action of the moment? These physical signals were not signs of weakness, but of misalignment.
After months of intense reflection, prayer, and one particularly heated argument (with Michael, truly my better half) at a seafood restaurant, I had to get honest with myself. I was tired of feeling swept along in the current of busyness. There were times it was like I was fighting against the very things I had on my list of priorities–being a present mother, cultivating a deep relationship with my husband, doing work that held personal significance and a positive impact on others. There was a very real tension in the pit of my stomach: even though my life looked “great” from the outside, I was missing the whole point.
The current state of Western culture loudly and persistently affirms certain versions of the “good life” and tries to sell it to us for a price. But if you had the chance to turn all of that noise off for a few days (or weeks), could you answer the question: what is your good life?
And an even deeper question: What are the values underpinning the vision of your good life?
You see, our values are what drive our decisions. We (often unconsciously) live day in and day out by our values without even naming them.
If you took a survey of your normal, everyday life, isolated a few key actions, practices, or behaviors, and analyzed them with as much objectivity as possible, what could you learn? For instance, what makes you get up before the sun rises? What feeling do you get when you leave an event early to go home? Why does an hour at your painting easel (or reading an academic paper) fly by in an instant? What are these clues telling you about your own life? You are living by a code already; is it the one you want shaping your life?
I believe that we were designed as people, and specifically as women, with extreme care, intelligence, and love by an infinitely wise God. This belief was formed over years of study of scripture, teaching within the church (and the academy), and my own lived experience. So, because this is my foundational belief about how I was made, when I found myself facing my looming fortieth birthday (and those persistent symptoms), I was free to get curious about what those specific signals meant in my life. When I went through this difficult season of not sleeping and daily chronic pain, it became a conduit for real-life transformation–the signals were showing me the boundaries of my own life.
In his 1929 apologetic book on why he is Catholic, G.K. Chesterton famously said,
“Don’t ever take a fence down until you know the reason why it was put up.”
With this statement, Chesterton is simply restating the wisdom literature of Proverbs: “Do not move an ancient boundary stone set up by your ancestors” (22:28, NIV). We live in a culture that is obsessed with the future, and with unrestricted “growth” or “evolution” or change, and often this is to our detriment; there is great benefit to looking to the past and asking good questions like,
Why was this fence put up? What might my forebears have known about life that I don’t know yet? Why is this limitation here, in my body, my time, my understanding? If I cannot change this boundary or limitation, am I willing to trust a God that put it there by design?
I am very much still on this journey. It’s the real work, underneath all the action…the quiet inward groaning of spiritual growth pains. Are we paying attention? Can we take the language of failure and redeem it for a wealth of learning? There is a better way than the one we’re sold online, and I think it starts closer to home than we expect.
Until next time,
SBL