Meg Evans

Because I generally subscribe to the belief that the body has its own innate wisdom, when I am dealing with its quirks, often I’ll begin by asking whether it has something that it wants to communicate.

I’ve been wondering recently, now that I have reached that age, what message the female body is trying to get across by way of midlife issues. Given the fact that most women experience them to some degree, treating them as medical disorders does not make sense. But, why would a natural transition cause us to feel uncomfortable?

Maybe it wasn’t always this way. The modern world is such a busy place, vastly different from the world our ancestors knew. So, I’m inclined to believe that our bodies want to tell us something like this:

INSTANT MESSAGE
To: Overscheduled Mind
From: Busier-than-usual Body
Subject: Hot flashes and such

Sorry to interrupt your carefully planned workday, Mind, with these annoying reminders that you live in a body. Well, actually, I’m not sorry. For way too long now, you’ve been treating me as if I exist only as a beast of burden to carry you from one task to another, without taking time to rest. And you know what? I just can’t do that anymore.

Yes, you’re busy, as always; but you need to understand that I am busier than usual too. It takes a lot of energy to rebalance those hormones and recalibrate my systems. I need much more relaxation and gentle nurturing so that I can recharge.

I’ve been trying to get your attention in other, less intrusive ways, but you haven’t listened. When I got so exhausted that waking up was a struggle, you plonked me down in the desk chair every morning anyway, sucking down enough coffee so that you could ignore how I felt. When I started to get achy from holding up the weight of the world, you just popped some ibuprofen and kept on going. You were so focused on meeting the culture’s demands that you never took the time to consider how poorly suited they are to the needs of midlife women—and everyone else, for that matter.

But I love you anyway, Mind, even though sometimes, you haven’t got the sense God gave a goose. That’s why I am still trying to give you this very simple message—slow down before you fall down. Instead of complaining about your change-of-life issues, understand them in the way they’re intended, and go take me for a peaceful walk in the woods.

Or listen to music for awhile. Read a good uplifting novel. Write a short story. Do crafts. Watch funny cat videos. Cook a new recipe to share with family and friends. Just look up at the sky and daydream for a few minutes, like when you were a child. You do remember being a child, don’t you?

I promise, taking a little break from the to-do list won’t make the world come crashing down on you.

My husband always does the mowing, while I am responsible for anything that grows in the yard and is not grass. Planting annual flowers in the spring is fun, but weeding—not so much. It didn’t really bother me at our previous house, which had well-established perennial flowerbeds and very few weeds. When we moved to this house, though, the neighborhood still had several vacant lots, and plenty of thistle seeds and other annoying weeds blew into the yard.

Digging those thistles out of the flowers often left me feeling achy the next day, unlike when I did the easier gardening at the other house. I started to wonder if I was getting sore because I was older. After all, I was turning 40, which had seemed quite far in the future when we were 30 and moved into the previous house. As time went by and I got busier with such things as the kids’ sporting events, I rushed through the weeding, with the mindset that it was a miserable chore and probably would always give me aches and pains.

This year, however, I decided to test the hypothesis that whatever aches I got were caused mainly by too much rushing around, rather than anything to do with my age. I did some weeding on Saturday while my husband mowed the lawn. Instead of rushing through it, I slowed down, taking a little time to walk around and stretch every few minutes. I also alternated weeding with a little pruning, so that I wasn’t in the same position the whole time.

A more leisurely pace didn’t actually take much longer; my husband was putting away the lawnmower at about the same time I finished the weeding. I felt fine afterward and spent a few minutes browsing through and uploading Creative Commons photos to the library for my art display. I particularly liked the photo shown below, entitled “Old Loggers Path.” I’m sure that must mean an old path used by loggers, but it gave me a mental image of a group of brawny guys with gray beards walking along carrying axes.

When I woke up on Sunday morning I wasn’t at all sore. I had to conclude that I would have avoided years of aches from weeding if I’d taken the time to consider possible causes and solutions. It seems simple enough in hindsight, but our culture doesn’t encourage a mindful approach to health. Instead, the prevailing assumption is that the body naturally falls apart as we get older and there’s not much to be done about it.

While it’s certainly true that the body, like a machine, sustains some amount of wear and tear as time passes, I suspect that much of what gets attributed to age is not really inevitable. Sometimes, all that’s needed is to make a few improvements in maintenance.