Getting a Mental Break

“How would you go about giving yourself a mental break?” My cousin Iris, who is a life coach, asked me after I told her about the anxiety and feeling of impending doom which have been following me since August. Would a vacation be a mental break? I asked her. “From what I know of you,” my cousin replied, “your anxieties and stress follow you to the vacation.”

How then does one go about taking a mental break? And what is a mental break anyways? “Just letting yourself be,” my cousin said, “without needing to do anything or achieve anything or finish anything. Just be.” She thought for a moment, then added, “Maybe it would be better to start with an hour. Or even five minutes. Or thirty seconds. Of just being.”

I went to take a shower. Before going in, I told my anxieties to wait for me outside. I asked the critic if he wouldn’t mind to let me go to the shower by myself, just this once. It occurred to me that I rarely shower without my critic leaning over my shoulder and commenting on how long I’m taking, how much water I’m wasting, and the general scarcity of water in the world. Let me enjoy my shower as a mental break today, I told him. Please wait outside.

It is much harder than I imagined, to get even thirty seconds of mental break. It seems my stresses and anxieties are standing by, ever ready to take advantage of any opening to come into my mind. I think to myself: all is well in my world at this moment in time in this place. And somewhere a whisper pesters: “But you don’t actually know that. The kids are not under your eye. Your parents are not here. Even Dar is in the other room and something could happen to him before you can hear.”

A friend told me the other day that the first step in the twelve step program is to admit powerlessness. I am, as yet, far from being able to admit that. Powerlessness scares me. My first thought in response to the whispering voice is that I should tell Dar to stay near me at all times. Can you imagine me actually doing that? And the critic, as though adding wood to the fire, laughs in my ear: “You’re a control freak,” he says, satisfied.

Oh dear. All these parts of me talking and commenting and judging. And where had the mental break gone? And yet, I think perhaps for a few seconds, maybe not for a whole thirty, maybe for only ten seconds or five, my mind rested in the moment of peace of the hot water washing the day off my back. Five seconds today, and maybe five seconds tomorrow, and maybe eventually they will start adding up, and I can rest in the moment, and let that mental break happen wherever I am.

Losing Control for True Love

Yesterday I finished reading The Capture of the Earl of Glencrae by Stephanie Laurens. The finely-wrought romance, set in 1820 England and Scotland, is full of rich descriptions of people, dress, scenery and customs, but I had a hard time relating to any of the characters. In other words, I didn’t fall in love.

Angelica, the female lead, lives in her head even in matters of the heart. Wearing an heirloom necklace which allows her to recognize her true love, she sets out to make the chosen man, Dominic Earl of Glencrae, fall in love with her. Dominic fully intends to marry Angelica. He needs her in order to get back another heirloom, the coronation cup which he must hand over to bankers by a certain date. As far as he’s concerned, love need not come into it.

Angelica agrees to help Dominic but refuses to give him an answer about their marriage. Her plan: to make him fall in love with her before she accepts him. Slowly she leads Dominic through the intricacies of falling in love. She shows him that she can manage a household and a skittering horse and that she’s interested in learning about Scotland, but each of her actions smacks just a little too much of over-thinking for me.

For Angelica, love is a carefully-planned campaign, the purpose of which is to bring Dominic to admit his love for her. For Dominic love equals a loss of control, a potentially life-long insanity. I’m not surprised that it takes the two of them over four hundred pages to fall in love. And even then I was not convinced that Angelica learned to love Dominic apart from the necklace which proclaimed him her hero.

In so many novels I find characters struggling with the fear of falling in love, afraid of losing control over their life. Yet I remember how much I wanted to fall in love as a young girl, the longing to feel the butterflies, the excitement. I fell in love with the idea of love, the sensations of love.

For a while I loved Haggai, then Avi, then Mitchell and Topaz. I remember being head over heels in love with Oron in seventh grade and later with Ze’ev, who I never realized liked me back. A first boyfriend, Tamir, when I was in tenth grade. And in the U.S. there was a red-haired teenager who I mooned over. And Yoni, the first boy I kisses. He was young!

I don’t think I ever resisted love or was afraid that it will disrupt life somehow. Over the years, my one most sincere, innermost and most often expressed wish was to be in love, to love, to be loved back. What is life without love but a desert of sorts? I always wanted to live it up a little. Fall in love. Sing and dance in the pouring rain.

And today, lucky me! I'm in love.