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Healing
In a world of so many non-negotiables, the very first thing many people sacrifice is ourselves
29
Oct
Oct
What are your non-negotiables? That was the question posed to readers of its ‘Wellness’ section a few weeks ago, hoping to discover the varying ways in which we implement self-care in our lives, and how we look after ourselves, or make our days a little more pleasant. What are the little things you do to give yourself a little boost, they asked?
The results were published in an article soon after and the range of answers was as wide and varied as people themselves. One man said he ate a Danish pastry every morning to honour his grandfather who had fought in the Second World War and who used to eat a pastry every morning too. (I liked the sound of this one.) Another swam for an hour every day before 7am. Doing things before work seemed to give people a great sense of satisfaction, feeling like they had achieved something before the working day had even begun. Others said that early-morning time to themselves gave them the headspace they needed to plan their day and start it off on the right foot.
As I read through the article, I wondered what were my non-negotiables. I thought and thought but couldn’t really come up with anything that I viewed as sacred, untouchable in my everyday self-care routine. Did I even have non-negotiables? The best I could come up with, the thing I did for myself every single day without fail, was to make a cup of coffee after the school run. But that seemed vaguely pathetic next to the early-morning swimmers of this world.
I think I’m actually a pretty good negotiator, if you consider that I happily negotiate away any and all of my free time, burning my little work-life balance candle at both ends with the equivalent of an industrial flamethrower. But we all do that, don’t we?
Perturbed, I tried another approach. What might a non-negotiable look like were I to try to introduce one to my life? Where would it fit? The area of self-care is notoriously neglected in the Irish Mammy™. Meditation was a big one for a lot of the respondents in the piece. I’m drawn towards meditation mainly because my life is noisy and busy so I fantasise about silence, solitude, headspace. When everyone else was obsessing about the character Eleven in the Netflix hit Stranger Things, I was just wondering if I could recreate her make-shift sensory deprivation tank at home. I do try to go to the occasional meditation class (as mentioned in this column in the past) but that is always optional, never non-negotiable. If it was a work commitment, or a family commitment, I would be there in the front row five minutes before the start every single week. Maybe my non-negotiables are family and work then.
But what about self-care, the thing that gives you that little boost every day? We often have lots of non-negotiables about our children or our work or the people we love, but somehow we often don’t extend those same standards to ourselves.
As I read more and more of the answers people offered about their daily non-negotiables I was amazed. These people really knew how to live. An hour of watching the birds with a cup of coffee in the morning. A chapter of a Nancy Drew book before bed. Counting yellow doors, or dogs, on their walk to work. I realised a lot of the specified non-negotiables harked back to the state of childhood, where we allowed ourselves the simple joy of noticing things like yellow doors or red cars or birds or the pleasure of reading for pleasure alone.
One person spoke about their non-negotiable actually being a half hour spent reading every day. I read every day too but my reading is always interrupted and disrupted and fragmented by my dire phone addiction. Another person spoke about their non-negotiable being some phone-free time every day. Now this I could get behind. I tell myself it’s not possible to turn my phone off. What if somebody needs me? What if there’s an emergency? But I turn my phone off when I’m in a meeting or at the cinema so it turns out it is possible. I’m seriously considering introducing a phone-free reading hour every day.
Some of the non-negotiables in the article were reassuringly small. One person said their non-negotiable was just trying to find a moment to savour in every day. It doesn’t have to be a huge effort, like an hour-long swim before dawn or a daily workout. It can be something as simple as that person’s suggestion, which was to take that moment of finding the perfect parking spot or catching a glimpse of a lovely moon as a moment to enjoy.
Often the things we enjoy are not viewed as important enough to prioritise, to make non-negotiable. Of course, we should all have our non-negotiables, particularly when it comes to things that make our days happier or healthier. It’s a no-brainer. But the thing is, in a world of so many other non-negotiables, the first thing that many of us sacrifice as negotiable is ourselves.
