Mowing Down Self-Pity
Living gratefully today, I appreciate being able to mow the yard I am thankful to have surrounding the house I am blessed to live in.
Our usual mower, our son Sam, is off to college again. That leaves my husband Darcy and I to complete the task. Neither of us minds mowing, but at the end of a busy work day we have less energy for it. We split the job last evening and I got in a short stint of a chore I have been doing for nearly 50 years.
I have always enjoyed mowing. Growing up with a big lawn on our farm, I recall how we divided the yard into several smaller plots and took turns mowing. The movement and physical strength involved were long taken for granted by me, until there were times when I could not do it. Those times are few, but they were surgery recoveries and the surgeries involved cancer treatment and/or prevention.
Yesterday, I arrived home tired and a little beaten down by a dose of self-pity. It stemmed from my sometimes complicated, and long-term, relationship with my job and also from a general lack of patience and acceptance in other areas of life.
I changed clothes, headed outside, revved the mower up and spent the next twenty minutes walking off that self-pity. Considering that I used to live in self-pity, this was a pretty short visit. It is a treacherous place for me to go, so I work to avoid slipping into it.
Living gratefully and practicing mindful awareness are two effective ways to keep me out of this pit that used to always pull me deeper and deeper, especially as an active alcoholic and in my early sobriety. At that time in life, and at other low points, self-pity was comfortable for me in my unworthiness and failings. It made me very complacent, and also very stuck. Rigid. Rote. A vicious cycle like none other. Dis-ease.
Today’s short forays into the stinking thinking and self-hatred are no longer comfortable. I work to return to healthier peace and ease. Yesterday, it took only a few trips back and forth in our yard for me to embrace the nice weather, the smell of grass, the blessing of mobility, and some self-understanding and acceptance. Mowing down grass, mowing down self-pity.
