The (Other) Three Rs: Relaxation, Rest & Recovery
How I learnt to prioritise recovery
Much of this article was inspired by the amazing book by Dr. Gavin Francis,
“Recovery: The Lost Art of Convalescence”.
I have a confession: I am terrible at recovery. Not just a little bad, not just something I am rusty at — completely, utterly terrible. This was not a problem for me for 45 years until Cancer showed up at my door (well, specifically on my tonsil).
I knew I wasn’t great at rest. My regular cycle of burnout and intense working activity for the past 20 years was testament to that. I knew I couldrest, on occasion, if I had to, if enough friends and family ganged up on me. I could have my hands pried away from my laptop to engage in real life, sometimes.
But I’d not really needed to rest often. This approach was something I’d got away with for my entire life. I’d always had the energy to mistreat myself, my mind, my body and my friends and family in this way. By most measures, I’d been lucky. Apart from a few knocks and scrapes I’d hardly endured more than a broken bone. I knew that I wasn’t mentally or physically in the best of shape but I could ignore any warning signs I was getting because I knew I could rest, if I needed to, and be back to form fairly quickly. I thought I was bulletproof, unique even.
How wrong I was.
Then the debt was called in. Cancer hit, with a vengeance.
I wasn’t just human any more, I was a sick human. I didn’t even realise that this was totally new territory for me. I felt confident, I brushed off my meditation chops, dusted off my usually relaxation skills, and got ready for this new episode of my life. I’d survived tough times before, I knew how to handle this. Push on, right?
Wrong. Dead wrong.
Recovery is not just R&R. Rest and relaxation have their place, but recovery has a totally different feel. It’s not optional, it’s necessary and, sometimes, physically and mentally demanded.
I’d been so naive. When I originally spoke with my team at work about taking time out for cancer treatments, my proposal was that Plan A was to be out of action on Mondays, chemo and radiotherapy day, and then to be out for an hour or two on the rest of the days of the week for just the radiotherapy. Plan B might mean I have to play it by ear on those radiotherapy days, but I’m sure I’d be around for at least half a day at a time. All this for 6 weeks, the duration of my treatments, only. This sounded good, it sounded reasonable. It wasn’t.
Fortunately for me, one of my team members had had her own cancer journey in the past and could call my over-confidence bluff. Her suggestion was that Plan A and B should be reversed. Treatment was going to be brutal, she knew it even if I didn’t. I should play it by ear and expect to be out of things a lot of the time, and she was right!
I still hadn’t learned my lesson though. I still had this unfounded, unscientific, unempirical view that I was special, that I could handle this, that I was still super-human somehow.
A pattern was forming: I was wrong again.
I’ve now let that myth of the übermensch go. After years of bouncing from burnout and back again, the necessary and essential recovery needed to work through my cancer experience has taught me that recovery is a skill. Accepting that I need to take a break, to snooze, to go for a walk, to take time enough out to actually get bored, is a skill that I still practice to this day.
The funny thing is that my work, including my writing, improves dramatically from practicing recovery. Who would have thought that having enough rest could inject the energy to make things fun again!?
Being a child of the closing thrashes of the “grit your teeth, push through, work is everything” late 70s and early 80s, it has taken me an embarrassingly long time to come to terms — literally grieve — the loss of that toxic relationship to the world.
To like, even love, myself enough to give myself the time to truly recover has been probably the most important lesson of my whole cancer experience. I’m still learning that lesson today.
And every aspect of my life is better for my practice of recovery. My work is fun again, I have energy to really invest in the connections with all the other humans in my life, and I feel again the passion and excitement in creating, which is important when you love to create software and write.
Recovery used to be a dirty word in my world but now it’s central to my enjoyment of this next phase of my life. My advice? Take your own recovery seriously. But not too seriously. After all, life can be fun and funny too.
Keep Plorking!1
Playing + Working = Plorking; “The Dude and the Zen Master” by Jeff Bridges and Bernie Glassman