Consider the information you ignore. The pages swiped away in a blink. The emails — for old fogies like us that even use email — hundreds a day, real, fake, urgent, irrelevant, scams, skipped over with hardly a glance. Plus ignored text messages, bulletins, alerts, pings. I’d hesitate to guess how much communication is filtered out, unprocessed: 90%? 99%? 99.9%? It’s amazing anything gets through.
Meanwhile, random stuff snags your attention. It wasn’t the poetry of the subject line, “Wellness Wednesday: Mental Health and Self-Care Week 7” that hooked my interest. Maybe because I had just gotten an MRI on my torn-up left shoulder. A little wellness might hit the spot. And what is “self-care” anyway?
I opened the message.
“Self-care is the practice of taking care of your physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual health,” wrote Chicago Public Media human resources manager Stephanie Sferra Bassill. “While many people view self-care as a form of selfish indulgence, prioritizing yourself is an essential component of overall well-being.”
Hmm… I thought… let me get this straight: my employer is urging me to set aside this work nonsense, these bothersome interviews, the endless tappity-tap-tap on a keyboard, and just live a fuller, healthier, happier life?
Well yeah. I can do that.
Where to begin?
For some reason I skipped the first, physical health aspect, and went straight for mental and emotional, dialing the number of a friend I’d been meaning to call. Isolation is a modern plague — we think we’re so connected by social media, when we’re really staring at a screen alone. I got his voicemail. A second friend. Also voicemail. A third. Again voicemail. No wonder we’re all so frazzled. A fourth call. Any guesses? Voicemail.
People really don’t use the telephone anymore.
But persistence is my stock in trade, and the fifth friend — a college buddy — picked up, and we spent 20 minutes talking and laughing, plus exchanging practical information. I mentioned the bad shoulder. He said his wife had a similar problem, cleared up by acupuncture. A treatment usually lumped with crystals and whale song, but in this case worked. I said I would consider it although, at this point, I’d also consider a trip to Lourdes.
At 11 a.m. my shrink called. For the past 21 years, since I got sober, I have been talking to the same therapist — I think of him as “my alcohol guy.” Not something I believe I’ve mentioned in the paper before, but in my new role as wellness guru, I probably should put in a plug, aware that a certain subset of male readership will scoff and scorn. No matter. I’ve developed my own wellness technique called “Not caring what most people think,” very valuable to both creative effort and maintaining mental equilibrium.
So why the psychologist? Do I need him to keep from going into the basement and drinking all the beer in the auxiliary fridge? I don’t believe so. But there is always some family situation or private anxiety to parse, and it’s less pressure on my wife and friends if I can offload my stickier woes, en masse, onto this poor fellow, who is paid to listen. Think of it like exercise — something done regularly to keep in fighting trim. Even on days like today, when my report is an enthusiastic gust of upbeat news, it’s nice to hear my bounty described out loud. Useful in encouraging gratitude, which is another valuable technique for mental wellness.
At lunch, I had considered grabbing a couple of the leftover Romanian garlic hot dogs we’d grilled for our Father’s Day gathering. But, remembering, “Wellness uber alles!” I ate a salad studded with fresh mozzarella balls, and was so pleased with my nutritious regimen that I topped it off by finishing the Graeter’s Strawberry ice cream. One must live.
Not wanting to ignore the physical component, I went to the YMCA for the first time in weeks and exercised —stretching, hitting the heavy bag, weightlifting, scaled back in consideration of the bum shoulder. Plus 20 minutes in the sauna. I usually skip that part, to save time. But wellness demands we slow down.
Back home, about 5 p.m., I walked the dog, lighting up a cigar gotten on Father’s Day. Not wellness in the traditional sense. But I would suggest that a well-managed vice is part of the complete wellness package. When we got back, there was some cigar left, so I sat on the porch, deliberately keeping my phone in my pocket, listening to Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue” and contemplating the early summer day, the blue sky, the green trees. Kitty, my dog, settled down beside me, seemingly content. Wellness is contagious.