Embracing the Gap

This past week I spent some time with a family in acute crisis, the kind of situation where someone’s sympathetic nervous system is aflame and the ability to make decisions—even those related to safety—is severely constricted. I won’t say more than that, partly to protect the people involved and partly because the particulars aren’t the point.

The approach in a time like that isn’t really an approach at all. It’s more like space by proxy. No judgement or correctives, just caring presence and acceptance. Not absorbing their state and not standing apart from it; offering without agenda the space to simply be, which can open into opportunities for the body and mind to settle into something closer to coherence. That capacity isn’t generated by effort. Actually, it’s not generated at all.

The depletion / recuperation cycle is so ingrained in the thinking of caregivers that it’s easy to miss that the same caring openness is available when not offering it to others. I’m finding there is no real need to differentiate, even as I recognize my privilege in even being able to take the time to rest.

Instead of “recuperating,” spacious awareness went to a movie on Saturday. On Sunday, spacious awareness spent time with its beloved in a slow stretch of togetherness and practice. Then spacious awareness watched a charming documentary with beloved while both kids were out being themselves and clearly enjoying it. Spacious awareness listened to music, and ate exceptionally well, owing to beloved’s culinary talents. Later, spacious awareness wrote, edited, and read a little for enjoyment.

OK, so maybe it wasn’t as nauseatingly precious as all that (but it was precious). Regardless, the orientation I’m pointing to doesn’t bother with dividing crisis and recovery from its own “side.” The openness in being with a family in crisis and the openness of an unhurried morning at home aren’t two different spaces, one earned by surviving the other. They’re already indivisible in the locus of experience.

Listen, you gotta pay attention to your levels—the body has needs, depletion is real, and pretending otherwise is just a different way of dividing. Tending to one’s bioenergetic needs is crucial. But minding the body isn’t separate from the awareness we’ve been talking about—it’s the same acceptance and care offered to one’s own system instead of someone else’s. You notice what’s there, you allow it to be itself, and you listen to what it tells you. And if you can really slow down and deeply allow, it will tell you.

So I embraced the weekend, though embraced is almost too strenuous. I surely didn’t retreat into it or expect it as payment for services rendered. I accepted it as it presented itself, with not-even-fucking-around love and openness. The same thing we do every night, Pinky.

Tomorrow the structure resumes and the week will ask what it asks. But the demands and the relaxing aren’t in opposition, because the space is the same. Or so I tell myself now, rested. And if I forget, I’ll hope for the fresh opportunity to remember.