Beaver building a dam

How serious and demanding about ourselves should we really be?

Skipped meditation & yoga yesterday. Normally the monday morning session sets me up for the new week. After the typical weekend often prohibiting focus and concentration. After having leisurely taken the kids and myself to sport events, birthday parties, play dates, the tea shop around the corner, obliged interrogations of other European languages and last but certainly not least, catering work. So hurray for Monday mornings’ dawn. 

But this Monday body & mind are telling me something different. It’s a bit difficult to comprehend and as such difficult to act upon. At 8.30 am, instead of making my usual way to the underground meditation & yoga cellar that serves as a refuge to both body and mind, I set myself up in the waiting room of the house doctor’s practice. A newly employed young woman listens to my story and pays it a lot of attention. I like that. Because I rather not focus on problems but at solutions instead. However discussing solutions does get bothered or restricted if resistance towards elaborating on problems is admitted. So what is your problem? asks the fresh doctor. I turn my head around curious after who’s standing behind my back. 

We settle for the conclusion that I’m ready to open up, at least a little, or at least that it is worthwhile to give it a try to open up a little. I rather shut the door close again right away after our twenty minutes chat. Which literally I do, leaving her small but bright ‘talk room’. The sign on the door post says ‘talk room’. I shut it close. But I do make the required follow-up appointment. There’s people that spend three to ten years studying physical and psychological conditions. I’m successfully convincing myself. Who am I, if I wouldn’t be able to tap some water from their sources?

An hour later I find myself in another waiting room. Physiotherapist introduces himself. Fortunately in this room I only need to concentrate on distinguishing left feet from right legs: ‘the other right leg please’ and rolling over tummy side up or the other way around. It doesn’t go by itself but definitely is a lot easier then what was being asked from me in the last health practicioner’s room. Follow up appointment is made and another little bag of homework carried outside. 

I didn’t come up with the first sentence of this little piece of brain sandwich if it weren’t for yet a third waiting room I attended within the following hour. This queen of allergens (the people I work with know exactly what I mean) did the most dreadful thing. For the first time in her life she took it seriously. She didn’t take it as a an act arising from the need for attention ‘I can’t eat fish if the head is still on, I can only take it if you can’t actually see where the meat comes from’. ‘So you mean, you only eat fillet of fish when it comes in translucent supermarket wrapping, perfectly groomed and colored, like as if it’s artificial?’ ‘Yes, that’s the only way I can handle fish’. ‘Okay of course I fully understand. As you wish miss’. 

This princess of abstention for one Monday morning also didn’t take her physical resistance towards most of the ingredients of a regular diet, as an act of proving to be strong willed. ‘I do at times feel the urge coming up to smoke a cigarette to give myself a break. I do at times feel the urge coming up to have a beer and not think about what’s next. I also recognize at times the lack of a stimulating boost of coffee, sugar or a little red spicy chilly’. ‘But I do not give in to all this divertimento’. ‘Seen it, done it, had it all’ is the firm line, cutting the border of one of the important five senses: taste. Because taste evokes emotions.

So yesterday morning this tough girl is temporarily locked in a closet. Just for a bit. The tough girl doesn’t really let go, she agrees to resign a tiny bit, just one Monday morning. In exchange she pledges for an explanation. An explanation of this ridicule behavior, spending an entire Monday morning walking from one waiting room into the other instead of focussing at what needs to be done. What needs to be done, it resonates. What needs to be done? Can you hear it too?

Third and last waiting room is a quick one. The homosexual bright and extremely witty nurse, fifty plus, considerably stylish, quickly points a needle in my left upper arm. We make jokes about I don’t know what. It doesn’t matter what’s it about. Fun and laughter fill the smallest room of the three I visited this morning. And I’m done. For now.

It’s not about results I tell myself. It’s about intention. And yes, it certainly is about attention. Their attention follows mine. I start. I did it. It relieves me in ways I don’t comprehend. But also that doesn’t matter. My blood is tested on allergens and other internal signs of physical misbalances. The mind will be dressed up to undergo some necessary changes and specific muscles and joints will be worked on. To find relief from blockages. The blockages we create like beavers building dams in order to survive.

Breath out.