Truth Bomb Tuesday: It’s ok to need a little down time.
“I just seem to need more down time than I used to. Am I just getting old?”
The answer to that is obviously yes, but also yes.
As you get older, you need more time to digest the immensity of life. You need more time to just sit down and let your psyche process everything in your experience.
More quiet time. More cups of tea. More just staring aimlessly out of windows.
I think digestion is the right metaphor here. If you knock back half a dozen pies, that’s a big load you’ve just placed on your stomach. You need to digest all that before you’re ready to deal with anything else.
And if you’ve been doom-scrolling footage from conflict zones around the planet – that’s a big load that you’ve just placed on your psyche. You need time to digest it. To process it.
And we’re tricked into thinking that it’s something light because it comes to us so trivially. We don’t need to seek it out. We don’t need to engage with a single human and all that human messiness. We just pick up our phones and it’s right there.
But just because it comes to us lightly, doesn’t mean it isn’t massively heavy. Sometimes it is hugely heavy. Sometimes we. just. can’t. even.
We are being asked to process and comprehend things that no human in history ever had to. 1000 years ago, maybe you heard about a war that was happening over the mountain range. Maybe you heard a few stories.
You weren’t live streamed directly into the conflict, or served up a montage of horrifying images, each one chosen to be more shocking than the last.
You didn’t have to deal with that.
But today, we do.
And it’s heavy. We need time to digest it. And we need more time as we get older and older.
And that’s not because our digestive system is breaking down. It’s that the membrane of our psyche is getting thinner.
I remember when I first came to Brisbane as a teenager. It was all so exciting and wonderful. I felt like one of the kids visiting Willy Wonka’s Chocolate Factory.
I was literally twirling around lamp posts.
But I was young. I was blissfully naive. My psyche was insulated by inexperience.
These days when I got to Brisbane – and it’s still a great city – but I see the heaviness too. I see people in poverty. I see the homeless. I see the people slowly going mad in slow moving traffic.
It’s hard and it’s heavy.
And these days, I just need time to digest it all. And the more experienced you become – the more you understand how the world actually works – the more digestion and processing time you’ll need.
And in that sense, it’s a sign that things are going right – that you are maturing as you are supposed to.
So it’s ok. You need more time to digest. You need more cups of tea and rain-soaked window panes.
It’s ok. Let yourself have. Let yourself rest and digest.
The world becomes unmanageable if you don’t.
DB.