Out of Ordinary Moments
Any Morning, by William Stafford
Just lying on the couch and being happy.
Only humming a little, the quiet sound in the head.
Trouble is busy elsewhere at the moment, it has
so much to do in the world.
People who might judge are mostly asleep; the can't
monitor you all the time, and sometimes they forget.
When dawn flows over the hedge you can
get up and act busy.
Little corners like this, pieces of Heaven
left lying around, can be picked up and saved.
People won't even see that you have them,
they are so light and easy to hide.
Later in the day you can act like the others.
You can shake your head. You can frown.
A wonderful teacher of nervous system health, who encouraged actively cultivating mental health daily, taught me of the importance of needing both “bottom up” and “top down” practices. Bottom up practices, she said, were the daily things we do that become like the work of cooking meals in advance and storing them in the freezer for a time when we’re too tired or busy to make something healthy. We do this not knowing exactly what the future holds, so with no particular event in mind that we’re “freezing meals” for, but with the awareness that, because life happens, some moment or season will come when having some reserves will be necessary.
Just like we can’t cook ourselves a healthy pot of soup if we’ve broken a leg or have contracted the flu, we can’t learn to navigate our nervous system when we’re in an acute state of trauma or stress. We have to have something we’ve “cooked” ahead of time that we know how to use to nourish our nervous system during these times.