July 9, 2024

Resistance

We slept in until seven o’clock. When I got out of bed, I looked out the window to check the weather and saw a lone deer standing near the western tree line, feeding on wild blackberries.

Later on the deck, I looked out into the forest as we sipped our morning coffee. A mild breeze moved through the yard, which I could both see in the trees and feel on my face. Faint bird songs emanated from deep in the forest, but the area around the yard was quiet. 

My wife and I talked a little about where she was with her schooling. After two years of pushing hard, the notion school was ending felt foreign. She still hadn’t received her end of curriculum grade, which kept the nerves going, making it hard to relax. The school usually took a few days to tally the scores with their complicated grading system.

My wife put some orange glazed cinnamon rolls in the oven, which we munched on while sitting at the dining room table. Once we finished, it was time for me to take a shower and get ready for work. While getting ready, I noticed I felt tense about my morning schedule.

For the past two years, I had spent my mornings writing and walking in the woods. This morning, skipping both activities felt stressful, like I was falling behind. Of course, this wasn’t true. My thoughts turned to a recent conversation I had with my wife about the end of school.

I told her she might expect to feel relieved and relaxed after school was done, but that my best guess was that this wouldn’t be true. For two years, she had battled a physician assistant program that made one thing clear: if you wanted to pass the course, then you had to spend all your time studying.

The amount of material and the time constraints between weekly and monthly exams meant that skipping a few hours of studying during any twenty-four-hour period was enough to put you behind, making it near impossible to catch up. This meant, for two years, my wife had made a habit of being busy every hour of every day. Once school ended, my hunch was that doing nothing was going to be highly stressful. Luckily, she had a national certification exam to prepare for at the end of August.

Brushing my teeth, I realized I was falling into the same trap, on a much smaller scale, of course. I felt displeased at my brain’s unconscious insistence that I should write or take photographs in the woods, when my wife, the most important person in my life, was sitting across from me for breakfast. We both needed to adjust to life after school. I made a vow to never let my work impede the quality of time I had to spend with my wife.

At work, a couple of people canceled meetings, which freed me up to get my task list cleared. Work was productive, and I noticed my energy felt even throughout the day, with no spikes or crashes. Distancing myself from social media was paying off. 

I enjoyed having my wife home throughout the day. She busied herself with chores and projects as she awaited her test scores. She also spent a lot of time with the dogs, which made them happy. When my wife was gone, the dogs slept most of the day. When she was home, however, they were always awake, wanting time to interact with their mother. I knew they would all sleep well tonight.

In the afternoon, she took the dogs outside, sharing fresh watermelon with them. She later told me that while she was out, she saw a herd of deer behind the house. Despite the intense heat, my wife spent most of the day outside. In the late afternoon, she came into my office and lied down to take a rest on the new spare bed. It was nice to have her close while I was busy going through reports. There was just something I loved about having this woman close to me.

While taking a break and grabbing a coffee, I noticed the Traeger grill was working hard, smoking a rack of beef ribs. After a couple of hours, my wife turned them on a very low heat, letting them cook for the rest of the day. Grilling meats for long periods of time at a low temperature was a key to tender, juicy barbecue. My wife liked to add barbecue sauce to the ribs early, so the liquid cooked into the meat.

While I was finishing up work, my wife got busy cleaning the bodega, preparing for visitors during her upcoming graduation, buying graduation clothes, and making study plans for her national exam. She also logged into her school account several times throughout the day to check on her exam grade. Nothing yet.

In the evening, we went outside, sat down on the rocking chairs, enjoying the cooler temperatures. When we were hungry, we went inside and feasted on smoked beef ribs, baked beans, steamed rice, and pineapple salsa. The food was superb.

As I washed the dishes and cleaned up the kitchen, my mind wandered to a reoccurring lesson my wife and I had experienced throughout the past two years regarding resistance. When we resisted against doing something, then the hurdle we had to overcome seemed daunting. The challenge felt impossible and sometimes we weren’t sure if we had the time or energy to address the issue at hand.

When we stopped resisting against the situation, however, the mountain we had to climb suddenly shrank into a molehill. I always found it surprising how easy it was to clear a task once I stopped fighting against myself. I supposed this made sense, since we were our most formidable foe. Just as we had the power to solve problems, we had the power to create them. As I was showering, I decided that the ability to recognize when we were resisting something was the first step towards learning to let go. Recognizing and releasing our resistance to life always made life easier.