Lollygaggin With Purpose

Somewhere along the way we started talking about our minds like they were routers. Always on. Always pulling something down from somewhere. Talking with people I have often heard it said plainly, my brain won't turn off, like the mind is a machine left running in an empty house, burning power for nobody.

I think what people mean when they say that is they can't stop searching. Not information exactly. Certainty. The next fact, the next explanation, the next thing to look up so the feeling sitting underneath doesn't have to be felt raw. Googling the symptom instead of noticing the ache. Replaying the conversation instead of sitting with what it stirred. The mind treats every unfinished feeling like an open tab, and open tabs demand to be closed, and closing them takes energy nobody budgeted for.

Most of us were taught this before we could spell it out. Somewhere in childhood, busy got confused with worthy. A body in motion was a body doing right. A body at rest was a body somebody needed to check on, or worse, a body somebody needed to correct. Relaxing got filed under lazy. Lollygaggin. Hemming and hawing around. Words that sound almost affectionate until you notice what they were teaching you to fear, which was stillness itself, and what it might reveal about you if nobody was there to witness the doing.

So we grew up building an identity out of motion. If you were still, you had to be able to account for it. Sunday afternoons that used to belong to nobody in particular started needing a reason. Rest turned into something you had to earn first and justify after, and a mind raised on that arithmetic doesn't know how to just sit anymore. It keeps score even when nobody's grading it. Call it what you want, the WIFI, the noise, an old inheritance running quietly in the background since before we had the words for it.

But what if it was never a race to begin with. Nobody ever handed you a finish line, you just started running because everyone around you was running, and stopping to ask where the race led felt like losing ground you couldn't spare. A field left alone for a season isn't neglected, it's resting on purpose, storing up what it'll need before it's asked to work again. Push it every season with nothing given back and eventually it gives you less, no matter how hard you work it. Bodies aren't so different. The hands that know how to stop are the same hands that do good work when it's time to pick the tool back up. Somewhere we forgot that rest was the maintenance, not the interruption.

My grandmother's generation didn't have WIFI in their heads because they didn't have WIFI anywhere. They had chores that used their hands and left their thoughts alone. They had porches, and porches ask nothing of you except to sit still long enough for the evening to do what evening does. Nobody was optimizing anything. Boredom was allowed to just be boredom, and something in a body at rest that isn't being fed new input eventually settles, the way water settles when nobody's stirring it anymore.

Getting quiet enough to hear yourself isn't about emptying your head. You can't think your way to not thinking, that's the same machine looking for a new task. It's about giving the body something ordinary enough to occupy it and interesting enough to hold it. Dishes in warm water. A dog that needs walking and doesn't care what you're ruminating about. Weather, just watched, not checked on a phone. The nervous system comes down through what the hands are doing, not through a decision made somewhere upstairs.

There is a difference between rest and numbness, and the body knows it before the mind catches up. Scrolling leaves your jaw tight and you don't notice until somebody asks why you're clenching it. Real rest loosens something you didn't know was held. You'll be standing at the sink, hands in the warm water, and somewhere around the fourth plate your shoulders drop half an inch and you didn't tell them to. That's the tell. Numbness holds you in place. Rest lets something go. Scrolling is still the router running, quiet, but running. The other thing has a texture to it. It's slower than you want it to be at first, and then it isn't.

If you don't know where to start, don't start with meditation, don't start with a retreat, don't start with anything that asks you to sit still and think about sitting still. Start with your hands. Pick one small thing your body already knows how to do without your mind's permission, washing dishes, folding towels, walking the same stretch of road you've walked a hundred times, and do it without a podcast running underneath it. Let your mind wander if it wanders, that's fine, the goal isn't silence. The goal is one task at a time instead of three, until your hands teach your head what stillness feels like before your head ever agrees to it.

A Closing Thought Shared..

The WIFI doesn't shut off because you decide to. It shuts off because your hands found something the mind couldn't argue with. Somewhere along the way we were taught life is a race, and if you slow down, or worse, stop, you fall behind. Nobody ever said behind what. Rest was never the opposite of a life well lived, it was always part of one. Now go and find your fourth plate.

McHenry Counseling