Ironic to be writing on this topic given my last post but then not so given I am a person chock-full of dichotomy and because I’ve learned that a healthier way demands that it be a matter of choice to be fast or slow and either is ok, just so long as I am mindful of what I am doing. I’m learning that, in order to thrive, I need to be able to choose when I want to inject some busy-ness, stimulation or excitement into my life (sometimes that’s just what I most need) and then to be able to pull back and be quieter, slower and probably more solitary for reasonably long periods too. In other words, there’s a balance to be found and my balance point won’t look like your balance point but the key is to be able to curate something approximately right…for me, just as you must do for yourself. The problem with our modern world is that it constantly asserts one way of life at the ever-increasing expense of the other. The more hungrily the speedy, noisy, highly over-stimulating way asserts itself, the less there is any peace left to return to when we most need it.

So I’m really in a place of getting used to some shockingly slower paced living where I have moved to now, coming as no small surprise to my nervous system. Which may seem odd given I’ve led a slow-paced recuperatory life for years, due to my various health challenges, yet what seemed like slowness and quietness all the years I “did pretty much nothing” recuperating wasn’t what it looked like at the surface but, really, the highest kind of overstimulation and it’s consequences playing out as symptoms. I know this because those symptoms speak for themselves. Peace is what goes on inside you when you’re finally able to slow down, inside as well as out, and I was never truly at peace internally while I was so triggered by where we lived, how we lived and the relentless of it all given how fast-paced everything was where we were located. Now I’m virtually in the middle of nowhere, its so quiet and peaceful it took quite a while to get over the novelty of no traffic, no light pollution, the far more harmonious sounds of nature dominating everything and even the sky almost devoid of air traffic whereas we used to live right beneath the convergence of all the Heathrow flight arrival paths. This is work in progress for me since adjustment is not my strong suit…a pleasant task, I have to say…but I’m finally starting to get somewhere with gearing down to match the location and to reappraise my preferences too. For instance, I used to think I actually wanted to stim myself as much or as constantly as I did, tapping my foot, rocking in my chair, reaching for my phone to “check up on things” every five minutes, for instance, yet its so interesting how the need to do so is fast-reducing, in fact I now resent the intrusion of life lived through a phone, more often than not, and am really starting to adopt stillness in a way that I hadn’t for years!

A mark of feeling better than I did is when I choose to be stimulated in some positive way from time to time because I’m not already burned out on the inside, meaning I have more surplus energy to spare and am ready to be reinvigorated for a spell, which is what I wrote about in my last post. It can be life-affirming to inject some variety or excitement into life and there have been times when I’ve jumped at the chance to do something different or spontaneous these last few weeks. However, when seeking that level of stimulation feels urgent or compulsive, it’s probably a distraction from something else going on and risks burning me out, even more, in the end. Here’s another truism; busier, faster, more stimulating doesn’t mean more is “happening” as some of the most powerful and profound things “happen” when I seem to be doing nothing at all. I can sit outside in my chair for three days pretty much non-stop, as I have done this week, and yet it feels like some really big stuff has occurred, hard as it would be to measure or explain it.

Right on time, I read the monthly blog from Timber Hawkeye (my favourite and most highly recommended subscription “Buddhist Boot Camp”) and he was right on topic with a post called “Pace” in which he talks about the time when he was relocating to a particular monastery and another student travelling with him commented “Goodbye civilisation!” to which the driver of the van they were in replied “Civilisation? I think you will find our destination significantly more civilised”. I could say the same about this peaceful place, which by comparison makes where I used to live, with its constant and compelling urgency, drama and hustle seem utterly chaotic, unhinged even, and so far displaced from any lasting sense of peace or stillness that it was fuelling my constant stress and illness. While TH was at said monastery, he taught himself to slow down his heart rate, his breathing, his movement and his thoughts and (apart from times when I consciously say “let’s go out and have some fun for a few hours” which is a decision, not a reflex now) that feels like exactly what I have been doing these weeks too. In other words, I’m learning a whole new way of being and that’s what I wanted to write about today.

I’m realising my personal sweet spot is to be able to reach out for just the right kind of stimulation, in the right amount without overdoing it, when I need it but then withdraw to its virtual opposite to claim much more peaceful, slower-paced time away from it all and ideally a fair bit of that spent on my own by choice, just as long as I get quality touchdown time with my partner and other select individuals when I want it. Denying this dichotomy in me, as in the need for a blast of excitement from time to time and then its polar opposite, to have company but then be left alone, and so on, has got me into all sorts of trouble and misunderstandings across the course of my life!

There’s still part of me that goes off looking for something to worry about every few days, like it’s prowling the hills with a riffle looking for marauders on the horizon. The merest hint of the “old” triggers will garner its attention. Where I’m staying is so so quiet, as I’ve said; in fact, it’s almost beyond belief to me that there’s anywhere left that’s so devoid of people and especially traffic, including the air variety, as I certainly never found such a place down south, not even when staying in the sweetest, most picturesque, places. Yet on a couple of nights, perhaps due to a change in the direction of the wind, I’ve woken to the distinct roar of something, perhaps commuters over the hill or perhaps its even a farmer getting an early start on the harvest with the guttural sounding combine coming my way. Whatever the source of the noise, the two times this has happened, I’ve also found my stomach is also (coincidentally?) tight and exceptionally sore, like after I’ve been glutened or eaten some other highly stimulatory ingredient the night before (I hadn’t) requiring me to talk it down with GABA supplements and relaxation techniques. There’s no question, my reaction to such a distant noise has been exaggerated.

This alerts me to just how much noise pollution, in particular, has had a PTSD effect on me; a painful hangover from years and years where overnight stresses and pain (one feeding into the other) kept me awake and became synonymous with every additional affront to my nervous system at the time, heavy traffic noise so loud it often made my house shake in the early hours being one of them.  I’ve written about all that before and won’t bother going there again.

My need to slow down and find a different pace “most of the time” requires that I prioritise a slowness and gentleness of everything overnight when I get my rest (no Wifi, dim blue-blocking lights used before bed etc) but you can’t guarantee that everything will conform, not even here. That said, I’m extremely grateful for the fact that manmade noise is absolutely minimal where I’m now living whilst fully acknowledging that my over sensitivity to it is a hangover from where I used to live and will hopefully reduce with time!

While I’m still so hypersensitive and reactive to extraneous triggers, I’m far from symptom free. In fact my fibromyalgia pain levels are intense right now, in spite of the rustic idyll, and worse of all early morning (especially if a noise happens to wakes me before daylight…) though most nights have been so quiet and pitch dark that I have slept like a log for the first time in years so noise or lack of sleep isn’t the culprit so much as an excuse. A whole lifetime of the kind of hypervigilence that comes with the turf of being neurodivgent and very highly sensitive makes this an old reaction that’s hard to break out of and I know I need to double-down on my TMS work by journal-speaking my emotions out at every opportunity now I have more time on my hands. When emotions go unheard, they become the inner landscape that overstimulates, even when the outside environment seems calm and fairly idyllic.

Importantly, I know I have to allow the safe space for my emotions to come up to be heard even more than usual right now, and not fall into the trap of I “should” only be feeling happy or grateful thoughts to be living somewhere so peaceful like I always wanted to. It’s more important than ever that I don’t make certain emotions feel “inappropriate” given the circumstances or they will simply bow their heads and shove themselves deep underground in my body again, resulting in even more pain down the line. It’s ok for me not to be ok…even when the circumstances seem pretty perfect, in fact especially so, as this is no-judgement territory here and inconvenient emotions are seldom so compliant and well-behaved as to only pop up when there is an obvious cause so I need to be prepared to greet them as they arise. Its important to know that TMS can especially come up after you reach a place of safety after a long stint in heightened stress (as spectacularly happened to me the year I left my stressful job…and then got much more severely ill than ever, exactly when I most expected to recover). Check out all the other anecdotes on The Cure for Chronic Pain podcast and you will hear many accounts of how TMS so often happens when you supposedly arrive in a place of rest and repair, because that’s exactly when the fight or flight finds its moment to raise the alarm to all the bottled up and hidden emotions you have been carrying around for so long, at which point the body will try to provide a massive distraction (of symptoms) to keep your attention away from the horror show of unruly thoughts that are threatening to put on their best performance, making you feel ungrateful and ashamed at your bizarre response to receiving the longed-for respite from stress. So I know this is when I most need to be prepared to entertain those feelings, not to shame them out of sight.

Symptoms are both the distraction from, and the messenger of, strong emotions that I’ve not been able to deal with before, so it’s time to start laying them out where I can see them as they occur…and this is the only task I’m making a priority as I settle into this slower life. One of those emotions is most certainly anger, another is frustration…including the frustration I feel towards the constant dichotomy of my own contradictory wiring; the push-pull, fast then slow factors that somehow have to learn to make a comfortable home together inside of me! Life itself is built on a structure of almost unfathomable amounts of dichotomy and my brain has been trying to make sense if it all, to no avail, all my life…so whilst I can’t solve the conundrums of the universe nor even change my own wiring, I must at least allow my frustrations the air and space to breathe and journaling is my best tool. Writing like this in my blog, where it’s all about honing a structure that other people can relate to, is important and useful to me but it’s also essential that I allow myself to write somewhere else where whatever comes out is utterly private and where there is no conclusion or structure necessary; where I can allow it all to be messy and yet somehow, at the end of spewing it all out, find some peace.

Yet a calmer environment setting the healthier pace is certainly helping and there is no work to be done here except to lap it up. The peace and stillness is setting a new rhythm that my nerves are starting to assimilate. It’s allowing the frustrations to cease bottling up as much and to be noticed more quickly as they occur but, mostly, I’m noticing that I’m taking on a calmer rhythm deep in my core and its one I hope to entrain to more permenanly, so that I can take it with me when we move again.

One of the things my nervous system is really relishing here is a “proper” weekend and most especially Sundays. Remember how Sundays used to be, when the shops were all closed and, whether you were in earshot of church bells or not, you could just tell it was Sunday because you could feel it in the air and in everyone’s gentler attitude and pace? My nervous system has been in mourning for that lost day for the longest time but most especially since the seven-days-a-week shop appeared opposite my old house and the nearby shopping mall, out of town stores, eateries, multiplex etc. began to draw even more traffic down the road outside our house, at the weekend, than on the average week day. Here, it’s so quiet during the daytime (and not just on Sundays) that there are moments I feel transported back to the 1970s and then I realise it’s been my dearest wish, for a very long time, to go back there as though to rewind the damage we all did when we thought more and faster were obviously best!

Though at times when my nervous system still seems to look for trouble to hook onto, I know I am making more headway than I think and steadily learning a new pace that will be currency in my future life. I can tell this when I let things…thoughts, impulses, tasks…go without hooking onto them or at least give myself a cooling off period. If I still really want to act on something a few hours or days later then I do it…like writing this post…without rushing it or making it an imperative. This considerably reduced impulsivity tells me it’s less of a personality trait to be impulsive than a reaction…more like a distraction…that I adopted in order to buffer the constant overwhelm of the old life. Having a sort of “offence as the best form of defence” approach to life by keeping myself more busy than all the busyness going on around me was a means of survival at the time. It worries me that this is virtually all the younger generations get to know since they get no respite from the constant overstimulation; no wonder so many of them end up with psychological problems and early life diagnoses, including attention deficit, or that increasing numbers of people now feel it necessary to go on Digital Detoxes, as TH also mentioned in his blog. At least I got to grow up in the slower paced decades before the brakes began to fail on the exponentially faster vehicle of modern life and I tend to draw on the feelings I bottled-up in that childhood to help me navigate things “as they now are”. It must be so much harder when you don’t even know what slower feels like, for comparison, having never encountered it!

I guess you know it best when you reap the benefits and they start to speak for themselves. I mark my progress by the days I don’t do things, including fall into old patterns. Every day that I react less and choose more is a bonus. Allowing “doing nothing today thanks”, “silliness”, “triviality”, “less”, “slower”, “fuck it”, “who cares”, “not my problem”, “not now”, “it doesn’t have to be perfect” and “I don’t want to!” to be valid choices is an achievement. Letting a day of nothing in particular be an accomplishment, even more so than a day of “productivity”, is a necessary mind re-program I am steadily adopting. Allowing myself to feel equally good about myself and, most importantly, relaxed because I managed to go slow today rather than ticking things off a list is a crucial reinvention of myself on the way towards, somewhere down the line, reaping a far healthier nervous system than I ever had in my life. I’m playing the long game now, the fruits of my labours no longer some transient thrill gained from fighting down another dragon but the slow and steady harvest gained from peaceful seeds planted in the ground on some equally slow and steady day and all the intervening patience I had to watch them grow.

In the meantime I get my kicks (because I can now) focusing on the small things deserving of more attention than long-range traffic grumble at 5am or anything else outside my immediate business and that includes the last owl hoot of the night followed by the cheerful trill of a wren to announce another peaceful morning arriving or the rhythm of the wind rising and falling like deep breaths inhaling and exhaling in the trees overhead as I sit in this beautiful green space doing my writing in the shade of a hot Indian summer day. If I keep at this, I will eventually internalise nature’s quiet and patient coaching to realise, first hand, that peace is an insider job and that I can carry it with me anywhere.