how small?

A Note: In June, I am teaching a virtual class on writing loss—Hauling An Ocean In: Voicing Grief. If you would like to learn with me or see what texts I’ll be teaching, you can register and learn more here.

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Image is my own

“A vocational rehabilitation therapist,” that is what Faye told me was her official job title.

I had no idea what this string of knotty words meant. It sounded like nothing at all. I was deep in acute grief, only weeks after Kurtis’ death. I was not tolerating the unknown well. On my computer screen, Faye’s hair was wound in a perfect blonde doughnut. It was the first of many virtual meetings we would have over the next two years. Faye explained she was here to slowly help me return to paid employment. This meant she would first help me return to the basic acts of living.

“Personal care, self care,” Faye said. “That’s where we start.”

I stared dully at her.

“You’re a pep talk for extremely sad people,” I said.

Faye just smiled. It was not lost on her that I did not mean this as a compliment.

“Do you brush your hair?”

I nodded. I used a bluish-purple scalp brush given to me by my hair stylist who dropped it off in my mailbox when she learned I couldn’t bear to use the green Wet Brush that Kurtis and I had shared.

“Do you shower?”

I shrugged. (No).

“Do you move daily?”

I shook my head.

“Okay,” she said. “We’ll start with showering or moving.” She wondered which I would like to start with?

At this time, I was still recovering from the multiple procedures required to clear blood clots from my leg and abdomen. I was using a walker to move around, my body fragile and unstable. I was also too grief-stricken to want to move, choosing to sit on the couch in the living room for all hours of the day. This all considered, movement still felt like the easier task to attempt. Showering felt entirely and absolutely impossible.

“Two minutes.” Faye decided this after a bit of thought. “Let’s try for two minutes slowly walking around the house or, if the weather permits, outside in the cul-de-sac.”

Two minutes. It’s the kind of time increment you use when you want to indicate that something will be done very quickly. It won’t take me two minutes, you might say. I stared at Faye, shaking my head. I told her there isn’t even a point to a movement goal of two minutes. It’s not a goal. It’s a microwave setting.

Faye wondered if I was really able to do more?

“I used to train for half-marathons.” I told her. “Over a hundred kilometers every month.”

“But is that really the case now?” Faye asked in such a patient but pointed way.

The answer was something she and I both knew—I didn’t do anything with my days except look out the living room window.

“The point of rehabilitation,” Faye said, “is to create goals that you can easily and actually achieve.”

I countered that goals are supposed to be difficult to achieve. That’s why they’re goals. Faye disagreed. She told me that a goal does not have to contain a degree of difficulty. She told me a goal was simply the hope to do something you were not yet doing.

“In grief work,” Faye told me. “Goals change. You have to go smaller.”

“How small?” I asked. “How small before it doesn’t even matter?”

I thought I should try for at least 30 minutes of walking in order to count.

“Count for what?” she wondered.

I was wrong, of course. Faye would teach me this lesson but grief would insist I learn it: if you want to do something, then always: start smaller.

The all-or-nothing thinking that I can apply to the idea of goals is so often the primary obstacle to beginning. Two minutes of actual walking is always more than thirty minutes of imagined running. While I would come to understand and accept this as truth, I believed none of it when I was talking to Faye. It was without grace that I accepted Faye’s 2 minutes.

As it turned out, 2 minutes was not something I could achieve. I missed days, weeks even, unable to move, frozen by a physical and emotional pain that only intensified. Faye, to her great credit, did not say: I told you so. Instead, she encouraged 1 minute of movement. As small as this was, this was something I could actually manage to make happen.

I think about Faye a lot. After I returned to paid work full-time, almost two and a half years after we began working together, her job was complete. I have not seen or spoken to her since. It’s a sudden and strange reality that I feel in so many different ways: people are here until they are not.

Last year, in January, I began to think again about physical movement. Returning to paid work had exacted a massive energy tax — I hadn’t worked out, even for 1 minute, in a year and a half. I was hoping to change this. I could feel the pull of a 90 minute goal. 90 minutes a week: I knew other teachers who managed this, why couldn’t I?

But, I also had Faye’s voice in my head: what are you doing now?

The reality was exhaustion. The reality was 90 minutes was far beyond the scope of “realistic.” So, I set a much smaller goal: 10 minutes a week. Jogging, if I could. Walking if I couldn’t. Cycling indoors if it was cold. It was a goal so small I was embarrassed to admit it to others.

I moved for 10 minutes a week for months. Slow but consistent walks or runs. As the year unfolded, some weeks I could run more than 10 minutes, and other weeks, I could only slowly walk the 10. By year’s end, I would have moved in some small way each week all year.

The idea that a big action happens by doing many small actions is not revelatory but it is a lesson I have to keep learning. Even now, I have to keep humbling myself to my own limitations. To to the fact that if I want to do more, then first: I need to do what I can.

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How can you start smaller? Tell me a small step you want to take.

This letter is part of a series I write each month called I’m wondering. This series takes up a question and is available to all subscribers. To learn more about how this series came to be, you can read read here.

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