L is for Lounging Around

Amber and Bumpkin

Before I got sick in March I was always on the go.  Monday through Friday I would work or volunteer at the school, and Saturday was our errand day.  From the time we got up in the morning until late in the afternoon we were running around getting things done and cleaning the house.  Just in time for dinner we would stop and finally settle in for the evening.  Sunday was really our only day to kick back and enjoy life, but even then we'd probably wind up finding something that needed to be done.


After my hospitalization in April I was reduced to basically doing nothing.  In those first months of being sick I may get out of the house for an hour or two, but gone were the days of running around for half the day then cleaning for the rest.  I can't say I can complain about the cleaning part; doing one small bathroom at a time was about all I could handle and that alone could take me all day.  


What I learned while I was "recovering" was that I COULD sit and do nothing.  The world would not stop if I didn't get something done, and my head would not pop off if I didn't do something productive.  In fact, many times I had to just sit in silence just so my head WOULDN'T explode.  Many hours were spent on the couch listening to meditation music on Pandora.  Thank goodness I had my laptop and blogs to keep me busy.  For some reason I could see the computer screen okay (for the most part) and could concentrate on short articles and posts, but reading a book was like torture.  I could only imagine what it must be like to be a child who cannot focus for longer than 10 minutes at a time.  That was me.  Maybe that's why the computer worked out for me so well.  I could jump from one thing to the next without really committing to any one task.  


Although I longed for nothing more than to get back to "normal" life, I quickly found that there was a new normal to get back to.  No longer can I run around all of Saturday.  Now I MUST give myself some time to lounge around.  Maybe the alarm doesn't get set during the weekends anymore.  Maybe I stretch in bed for a few more minutes before crawling out where I used to hop out of bed like a spring.  Maybe Saturday afternoons are spent watching a movie or catching up on Grey's Anatomy instead of cleaning the bathrooms or organizing the books I want to bring to school for my classroom library.  No matter what the method, I have finally found value in lounging around.  I no longer consider it lazy.  It is now restorative.