The problem with slowing down to avert a crisis...

...is that it works; and then the Laziness Lie rears its ugly head...

As I wrote about in December, I was diagnosed last October with heart failure, and put on a regimen of medicines that were meant to effect improvements in my heart’s function. Unfortunately, a recent cardiac MRI revealed that six months on, these meds have not produced any of the expected improvement, although my cardiologist assures me there is more fiddling we can do with the doses, and sometimes they can take a year or longer to show an effect.

At the same time, there was quite a bit of good news: other than not pumping very efficiently, my heart looks much healthier than we feared, and I continue to feel well and am able to be active and get lots of exercise.

Also, I am a good candidate for a pacemaker/defibrillator device, which I am scheduled to get on Friday 12 May. I am very happy about this, as it may help my heart get better, and it will protect me against sudden cardiac arrest, which I am at increased risk for. Remarkably, the procedure is outpatient, I won’t even be put under general anesthesia, and the recovery will not be onerous. All of this is enormously comforting to me.

It’s a strange thing to be quite ill but to feel quite healthy. Amd while I would never wish on myself or anyone to feel poorly in the ways it seems I ought to feel, there is definitely a sort of cognitive dissonance in walking around feeling as though nothing has changed, but knowing, in fact, that things have changed quite dramatically. There is a certain existential dread that can descend without notice and follow me like Pigpen’s stinky cloud.

The invisible and unfelt nature of it, the fear of a sudden death lurking around the corner (or worse, in my sleep), the general not-knowing—this is a script tailor-made to send me into a tailspin of anxiety, panic, and depression. Of course, I have experienced some of all of that—it’s been a lot to wrap my head around. But mostly I have not found myself in a debilitating emotional crisis.

I chalk this up to two things: good friends (especially Joel, my kids, Jesse and Gray), and s-l-o-w-i-n-g d-o-w-n. Like way the hell down.

You may have noticed—my plans for regular newsletter articles here, and consistent videos on The Spiral Lab, have not exactly panned out. My garden is not planted. Home improvement projects I started last summer are languishing. The book proposal I optimistically thought I would be writing this spring is still a mostly-blank Google doc.

I have not been entirely successful at slowing down, but mostly I have given myself the same permission and calm reassurance that I would give any of you—it’s not just OK that I’m slowing down, but it is in fact exactly what I need to be doing right now. Reading lots of mystery novels. Talking lots of walks. Taking even more naps. Dabbling when it feels right but not finishing much.

And here’s the thing: it has worked! Proof of concept! Slowing down really can help avert emotional, psychological, and physical meltdown and crisis. It’s not laziness, it’s ancient, healing wisdom!

But that Laziness Lie, as Dr. Devon Price calls it in his book “Laziness Does Not Exist”—it runs deep. And wouldn’t you know, lately it has found a crack in my equanimity and—as it will do—has exploited the hell out of it.

If you’re feeling so good, why aren’t you getting more done? Hmmm?

You don’t even feel sick! You’re not even in an emotional crisis!

You have no excuse for doing so little and just lounging about all the time.

It looks like you really are just lazy after all.

Of course, the Laziness Lie has twisted the causation, as it is wont to do, because the reason I’m feeling well is precisely because I’m doing very little.

But our culture can’t stand for someone to be quite well and happy and still unproductive. Choosing to be unproductive for the sake of our well-being—and then to have it actually work!—this infuriates the Laziness Lie.

Lately I’ve been ticking a few things off my list, methodically and oh-so-slowly, in anticipation of my pacemaker procedure next week. In between, I bake apple-rhubarb pies and make breakfast-for-dinner for my kids and binge-watch houseplant videos on YouTube.

And of course, take lots and lots of naps.

I’m ticking things off in the hopes of clearing the decks for writing and video-making this summer. Not because I have to, but because I actually love this work. When I choose it. When I don’t feel rushed.

Living with a cloud of existential dread over your head puts some things in perspective. It’s easy for me to compare myself to others, especially other disabled people who seem to have figured out how to be much more productive than I am, but I keep coming back to the line from the Mary Oliver poem The Summer Day, “Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?”

The Summer Day

Who made the world?
Who made the swan, and the black bear?
Who made the grasshopper?
This grasshopper, I mean—
the one who has flung herself out of the grass,
the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,
who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down—
who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.
Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.
Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.
I don't know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?

—Mary Oliver

For me: kids, community, food, friends are all high on my list. Reading and watching TV just for pleasure. More long walks and more natural beauty for sure. Writing is most definitely an enormous source of pleasure and meaning. And making videos is too. Maybe a book. Maybe. We’ll see.

Which is all to say that I’m still here, and I’m not planning on going anywhere. But it’s all going to be slow, and probably inconsistent.

I’m designing a life that works for me, and which I hope enriches the design of your life as well.

It will probably be June or July before I’m writing and making videos again at all regularly, though I have just posted a video to The Spiral Lab whose script began as an essay here on Divergent Design. It’s about what you can learn about your personal interior design style from hating on Farmhouse. I had so much fun working on this video (and even edited a lot of it myself, though all the fancy stuff is still Jesse), and that was in large part because of the thoughtful, enthusiastic feedback you gave me to the original essay. There will definitely be more like this just as soon as I’m recovered from my procedure—not because I have to or should, but because this is precisely what I want to be doing with my one wild and precious life.