You must change your life

Not rushing, perimenopause, taking pictures with my mind

“The rush and pressure of modern life are … perhaps the most common forms of contemporary violence. To allow oneself to be carried away by a multitude of conflicting concerns, to surrender to too many demands, to commit onself to too many projects, to want to help anyone and everything, is to succumb to violence.”

- Thomas Merton

“Think of our life in nature - daily to be shown matter, to come in contact with it - rocks, trees, wind on our cheeks! the solid earth! the actual world! the common sense! Contact! Contact!”

- Henry David Thoreau

Denise Lewis’s voice is in my ear telling me not to speed ahead, she is specifically telling me to pace myself. My inclination is to run too fast - this pattern of flight is a well-worn groove for me, and at first it’s jarring to be told to stay with something. But as time goes on my system starts to release into it, this not-rushing, this slow running, and it feels like a relief. I am obeying Denise Lewis, I am yielding to her instructions - who wouldn’t, what a woman! - and it feels like letting go of something I was gripping. She says, this is about building up stamina. There is no rush.

It’s strange that starting to run again is helping me slow down, one of my objectives among a few others: reducing the pace, resting more, learning how to be present, not spinning too many different plates and not being such a perfectionist. In the midst of what I am pretty sure is perimenopause, this feels more and more imperative, as my cycle, which had become a familiar anchor for me, ceases to be so predictable. I don’t think many people rate wild fluctuations as their place of comfort, and on many days I feel like I’m being thrown around in a tumultuous sea. Days in my cycle that used to be awful are now ok, and ok ones have become symptomatic. But then the next cycle it’s completely different. There has to be a degree of nervous-system capacity to deal with such unpredictability, as well as physical capacity for increased symptoms. Women in their 40s with young children of their own, also balancing paid work and possibly caring for their own parents, are likely to come up against a lot of challenges in trying to craft their life to suit what their body is going through (around half of the respondents in a Unison study reported having time off work due to menopausal or perimenopausal symptoms).