A Life Shaped by Time at Home

I’ve been at home for a long time. 

After I got sick in 2010 and had to leave my life in Nashville, I spent a year in my childhood bedroom kicking and screaming, desperate to be back dancing in Tennessee honky tonks. That year, I booked about ten flights for trips I couldn’t physically handle, then cancelled them as I wept on the floor unpacking my suitcase. The denial years! 

Then there were the sad years. I remember them as a blur of Dexter episodes in my parents dimly lit basement while I nursed a sore throat with warm salty water.

Next, the social years - the I’ve-got-to-get-the-hell-out-of-the-house and live my life years. I can just see the montage of so many fake-smile, just-act-cool, keep-it-together dates…followed by collapsing on the couch for days as I recovered.

I was in bad shape. I was sick all the time. No one could figure it out. While my friends took cool jobs in big cities, I passed my days mastering my use of the remote control. I hated it. I hated being home.

After five years, I still couldn’t find a name for why I felt like shit all the time, so I figured it was time to change my relationship to being home. 

And when I say being at “home,” I really mean being with myself.

I was lucky to have some wiser, older people in my life who had already survived some really hard things. One of them, Mark, kept reminding me that slowness was what the world needed most and that I could teach slowness with my life. 

I didn’t want to be slow, though. I wanted to be free and fast! It took even more miserable months in bed for me to surrender to the new rhythms of my Benjamin Button existence - I needed quiet conversations, slow walks and an afternoon nap. I was 85 at 26.

Eventually, I moved out of my parents’ house and into my own place, working as a freelancer at the front of my apartment in the morning and sleeping like a dog in back of my apartment through the afternoons. And as totally exhausted as I felt, I forced myself to go out almost every night - seeing friends, taking a yoga class - doing anything I could to NOT be at home. Home was scary because home meant being alone and that meant I’d likely feel pretty depressed about how sick I was.

Something began to shift for me when I read Paul Elie’s epic four-part biography The Life You Save May Be Your Own. I read it twice. I loved it. I saw myself in Thomas Merton’s questioning search for meaning and in the dusty, southern slowness of Flannery O’Connor’s creative life. The book sparked my interest in these writers' practice of contemplative spirituality- or whatever it was that transformed these suffering people into such bearers of light.  Over the next few years I found myself in the deep armchairs of spiritual directors, walking the quiet plains of a Missouri Benedictine monastery, and ditching church for the garden.

I wondered: What if living with chronic illness can be like choosing to live in a monastery of my own making?

One morning I sat on a pillow in a sunlit square of my apartment. I stayed silent and centered, but also felt bored and wildly distracted. It was nothing life changing, but it felt good enough for me to keep coming back every morning. 

Soon enough, I stopped going out so much. At night I took long candle-lit baths, soaking my tired body and repeatedly thanking it for all it did for me to keep me alive. I wrote more, I read more and I cooked so much I began to make my own ketchup from scratch.

I blame it all on the pillow. In meditation, I could receive a lot of sweetness from the only one who knew how bad things sucked : I see how much you’re suffering. We are going to figure this out. I love you so much. 

The more I sat in silence, the more I came to love being at home. As home felt safer, I felt safer, and being sick felt safer.

Being stuck at home is being stuck with ourselves - and that can be a comforting or a terrifying experience. 

The quarantine is bringing up all kinds of emotional material for each of us. Some people are using this time to ramp up their productivity and clean out their linen closet. Others are zonked out on the couch getting much needed rest, poor things. 

Without making suggestions about how anyone should conduct themselves during this global crisis, here’s one thing I know for sure: we do the most important work of our lives at home. 

Home is where we do the mundane, physical work to keep life in order, like unloading the dishwasher, huffing laundry baskets up the stairs, and matching socks (my least favorite chore). 

And home - especially right now - is also the space for pausing, resting and investing in our core relationships - primarily the relationship we have with ourselves.  

All of this makes me think of the great quote from the philosopher Blaise Pascal: “All of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone.”

Maybe you have four kids and chronic migraines and you’re like, “Please, girl. I would love to be quiet in a room by myself this week.” 

But I think the opportunity to connect with our inner self can actually happen in the throes of daily tasks - or more so in the lulls between those tasks.

As a super pragmatic person, I’m all about meeting people where they are with any invitation I offer.  So, here’s a small thing I’m playing with right now: I’m trying to observe what I do when I’m feeling bored at home.

I notice I almost always reach for my phone. Don’t you?

But when I can resist the temptation to grab my phone, I’m always pleased to find what’s waiting for me on the other side of my boredom -- sometimes it’s an idea for the garden, other times a reminder to reach out to a friend. It’s always something more fulfilling than scrolling mindlessly as I sit on the toilet and my legs fall asleep.

On days I let my mindlessness turn me into a robot, I can easily get lost in the tidal wave of scary headlines or notifications. Soon enough, the day is gone and I couldn’t really tell you what I was feeling all day, but I can bet there’s a bit of fear or worry lurking just below the surface - for me and for you.

Time at home has a funny way of showing you where it’s time to do some work on yourself. In my life, limitations have been the precursors to possibilities. Tense relationships can soften after enough awkward dinners. Loneliness can lift into solitude. Restlessness can be surrendered into much needed rest.

We all could be at home for a while. You might want to find yourself a pillow.

x

Lindsay

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