On fatigue…
A short experiential dialogue between co-editors and friends
These online, on-page ‘unpsychological’ dialogues have been a staple format for Unpsychology Voices for a number of years. We’ve used them here in our online publications, and in our magazines too. It’s a time of trouble for the world at the moment (hasn’t it always been so?) and this plays out in our bodies, our minds and our everyday lives… So, here’s a short exchange between us that comes out of our own individual and relational experience… on fatigue…
It begins on Saturday and extends into Sunday, the following day…
On fatigue…
Julia (Saturday)
Hello Steve.
I’m on a train just now, heading home from London where I was attending a meeting. I’m feeling pretty exhausted: it’s the end of the day, and the Big Smog — while a brilliant city — is also demanding with its crowds and its traffic and its urban pace.
Fatigue has been on my mind lately, as I’ve just come out of a period of unusual malaise. For several weeks I’d been tired and dragging, with sleep making little difference. Mainly this has been due to a relentless workload, but also a recently-identified vitamin deficiency. Having now dipped into vitamin supplements, I’ve noticed that I am feeling better. But even that temporary drain on my resilience has made me more aware of my limits, more cautious about making commitments.
I’ve also recently found myself trolled by books such as Tricia Hersey’s Rest is Resistance, and Jenny Odell’s How to do Nothing. I keep coming across them, and thinking, with bitter irony, that I don’t even have the time to read, let alone to stop and do nothing! All the more reason why I must unplug!
But I haven’t meant this to be a moan — rather as a chronicle of our times. Only five years ago, things came to a standstill and we all focused on the immediate circumstances surrounding Covid. In 2020, it felt as though the fast-paced culture of our society might really have broken under the weight of its own collective hubris. Yet here we are, a few years later and as busy as ever — streets glutted with cars, schedules glutted with appointments and social arrangements.
I love the work I have chosen to do — the projects in which I am involved, the writing I’m doing at this very minute — I just wish I had more time and more energy, less fatigue and less frazzled attention. So that is my opening bid to you: how can I observe this fatigue in such a way that it makes a difference? In other words, how can I slow down? Over to you…
Steve (Saturday evening)
Hi Julia,
I know that one of the things both of us have had to learn through our lives, and maybe through the past decade or so in particular, is how to work with our personal limits, and also with what we want to achieve in and for the world.
Our passions and calling don’t give us much choice in what we do. When we feel the ‘tug’ it’s almost impossible to resist, I think. But the cost can be the toll it takes on our very human bodies and minds. I share the frustration around the ‘self help’, ‘slow’ and ‘unplug’ movement. I know these writers mean well, but the seams of experience that both of us tap into, in our particular ways, don’t have any straight lines, causality and intent in them, however much someone tells us to slow down or stop!
And yet rest is essential for me too. As you know I retired from my employed work at the end of last year and it feels a bit like I am trying to recover from decades of engagement and ‘frazzled attention’ (as you put it!). I know that pandemic times were awful in many ways, but I must admit (slightly guiltily) to enjoying the pace and pattern of those times, and the seeming promise of a reset.
I think an important thing we’ve been exploring and learning together — personally and creatively — in the last few years is the importance of diversity of experience andthe ways in which interrelating social, ecological and collective contexts (what Nora (Bateson) would refer to as transcontextuality) affect the individual human psychology (in this case, yours and mine) — in mind, body and spirit…
Anyway, while you’ve been on a slow train, I’ve been on my sofa on a filthily rainy day, watching sport for much of the time — escapism, some might say — but it’s part of what I need (I’ve discovered) to let my system settle. Even so, my darting, overactive mind still wants to be doing something… making a difference!
You ask: How can you slow down?
Frankly, I don’t know, Julia, except that sometimes our bodies and/or our minds short circuit or break down if we don’t find the right ways of balancing these energies and contradictions — the tensions between what we love to do and where our limits lie, and the big feelings we have about the world and each other…
Julia (Sunday morning)
Dear Steve,
It’s morning now, and I’ve had a good long sleep. I’m ensconced on the sofa with a rug over my lap, cup of coffee by my side, and a view from my window out onto a glorious autumn morning. Fatigue is at bay.
Interestingly, much of my current work in the mad movement extols the value of breakdown. When I step outside the haven of my home, into the fast-paced world of 21st century capitalism, I see breakdown as a necessary corrective. I learned so much from my own personal breakdown, more than ten years ago now. Perhaps the hardest lesson was to recognise with humility that I can’t do it all. Clearly it was the hardest lesson: I’m still wrestling with it!
So I look with gratitude to the idea you’ve mentioned: balance. I think there is so much in this. I was about 12 years old when I finally learned how to ride a bike, overcoming my fear with a friend’s help. I can recall her shouting out words of encouragement from the pavement, and can still evoke the feeling of elation that I felt when I mastered the wobbling and found the sweet spot of balance which kept me upright. So perhaps I might evoke this memory in my current circumstances, and visualise my various commitments as the wobbles of gravity tugging on me. Work and rest both pull in their respective directions, and if I can stay attuned to them each simultaneously then I can find that sweet spot which will allow me to keep my momentum. This process is somatic — whether cycling or moving through the world’s challenges.
And taking the metaphor a bit further, I’m thinking now of the taxi ride which brought me from the Southbank area up to Kings Cross, before that train journey. The window of the cab was open onto a beautiful and freshly cool early afternoon. It snaked through the various neighborhoods — through Aldwych, along the Strand, by the Courts of Justice, along Fleet Street — and something I noticed was the many cyclists navigating past us. Bold and agile, they glided past us and slipped neatly into the small gaps between cars and buses, creating a sort of traffic ballet.
So there is something to be learned there as well: how to navigate the crowded roads of my responsibilities, with the agility and balance of an urban cyclist. I don my high-vis and I stock my pannier with my personal skills and inner resources. I know my friends have got my back — like the friend who helped me learn to ride in the first place. So I take hold of the handlebars and step down onto the pedal and….
Steve (Sunday morning)
…step on the pedal, Julia, and… away you go! Gliding and sliding through the cracks in the world and the city. Like the London cyclists, I think this is available to us, you know! It’s a marvellous thing, and an antidote to the apocalyptic naysayers who say that modern life is all rubbish. Because even when things are rubbish, there’s still joy, movement, relationship and relaxing moments to be had.
Your work with madness is a real boon, I think, because it tells us something crucial. That much more than big picture critiques of modernity, we might need nuanced and forensic reflections of individual and collective experience. That’s why I love Ursula LeGuin’s work. Somehow she always gave the impression of balance and integrity — even as she was telling her wonderfully detailed stories (and working very hard at her writing!). At the same time, diversity and normality is baked into her humanity — it’s just there, not debated or fought over. That kind of creative life makes me feel far less tired!
An old friend of Unpsychology, Cae Hawksmoor, who has an editing platform on Substack posted this today:
Don’t tell us the world is at war in your story: show us the bands of vicious deserters attacking your characters on the road.
Don’t say that magic is dying. Show us your mage MC’s spells fizzling out at the worst possible moment
Whenever you can, create context through consequences, not exposition.
I think it’s relevant. When we focus on consequences (for individual protagonists, that is to say, us) it might be easier to see our way through to what might be necessary for us to keep ourselves in balance. Obviously if marauders are attacking us, we need swift action, but at other times the everyday magic of ordinary human life might be enough to fend off fatigue…
I’m not sure if I’ve gone off track a little bit here (or a lot) but somehow finding context seems relevant when there are so many ‘big brains’ trying to bloody explain everything! Now that makes me very tired!
Julia (Sunday early afternoon)
I’m going to pick up on that wonderful word: joy. We could do worse than to use joy as our guiding principle, when finding balance. Obviously joy is as subject to the winds of fate as any other response: life’s only constant is change, so expecting constant joy is deluded. But recurrent moments of joy are possible, and finding these moments helps us to endure the things which drain us. For the record, I’m feeling a quiet joy just now, looking out at the lush green of the shared garden, and communing through words with you, and with our readers by extension.
I do think this is part of the story of balance — because it is so easy to get caught up in our work, and the demands upon us, and just settle into a groove of stress and resentment. I don’t mean that we can happy-think our way out of anything. But just as my body responds to a healthy diet and necessary vitamins, my mind is likewise nourished and sustained by those pockets of joy. Settling my attention onto those moments, when they happen, and allowing them to soak into me. Thank you for reminding me of this simple truth!
Steve (Sunday afternoon)
Hi Julia,
You’re so right! Pieces of joy.* They make all the difference, and make the tiring stuff — even the bits we choose and love — more manageable, I think.
Like you, I’m enjoying the garden this afternoon — blue skies and sunshine replacing the stair-rod, greyed-out rainstorm skies of yesterday! And the birds are back flying, no longer hiding their bedraggled selves under bushes and trees.
I went to a class at the sports centre this morning — it’s called Body Balance — which is apt, given we’ve both been taking about balance in this conversation! I always feel rejuvenated after sessions like this, my yoga classes and the tennis I now play regularly. I know it’s a privilege to live like this, but all this does give me the sense of something that is the opposite to fatigue. Something joyful, balanced, engaged and then, perhaps, even enabling and energising.
And to reflect: championing balance and reminding each other of the importance of joy. I think that’s pretty unpsychological, don’t you…?
* Note: In 2014, I (Steve) published a book of poetic essays entitled Soul Manifestos and Pieces of Joy, so JOY is right up there for this particular soul manifesto: https://www.rawmixture.co.uk/soulmanifestos
Raw Mixture are hoping to republish the book soon and Steve has been writing a series of short essays in the style of Soul Manifestos and Pieces of Joy on Substack, you can find the most recent one below and the full series as it grows here: https://unpsychology.substack.com/s/soul-manifestos-24
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