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Keisha E. McKenzie | communication | systems | social good

wellness

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Working backward to work forward

Street art in Kumasi, Ghana: Photo by Gorodilova
Photo credit: Gorodilova

Among the Akan people, the sankofa bird represents the work of reflecting on the past, drawing forward what’s good, and making good with the past in the present.

A good review enables you to do that with your own history.

Reflect on your last decade: 2006-2016. When you can identify the consistent patterns in your recent past, that gives you a great basis for interpreting your current life and recurring experiences.

Earlier this year I designed a tool for auditing 10 life zones, evaluating one’s health in those zones, and taking concrete action to progress. (Right-click on the two images in the slideshow below and save them to your device so you can come back to them later.)

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Trace your last few steps so you can plan your next few steps, and review the full landscape of your life so that you don’t miss patterns that are connected.

If this process helps you as you review your recent past this week, send me a note and tell me.

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The most important part of the pyramid

A glass pyramid photographed with a bright blue almost cloudless sky.
Photo credit: Ice Cream Photography

Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, commonly represented as a pyramid, has physiological and safety concerns at its base.

These basic concerns include food, shelter, and freedom from violence, and it makes sense that people need these existential needs met in order to live well.

But it’s easy to focus on planning for everything else except the basics at the bottom of the wellness pyramid.

For years, Britain’s junior doctors have protested their working conditions. They conducted a strike this spring to challenge excessively long shifts and the risk of harming patients with fatigue-fueled decisions.

Like all too many entrepreneurs, parents, and academics, medics are, as Angel NP recently said, doing “too much for too many with too little. And running on fumes.”

I’ve joked before about the United States being a workaholic’s paradise but our incidence of chronic and so-called lifestyle diseases tells me it’s not in fact funny. The constant wear of overscheduling and sleep deprivation has physiological consequences as much as it also affects people’s efficiency, effectiveness, and satisfaction.

As you determine your goals for this coming year, keep your physiological and safety needs in mind.

How can you plan for a solid morning meal before your work day starts? What could you take off your do list so that you can dedicate time to physical conditioning? How can you budget or redesign your evenings so that good sleep is guaranteed?

Just as the pyramid is the most stable shape because of its base, our quality of life rests on whether we can secure the fundamentals of physiological well-being: not only for ourselves but also for each other.

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Don’t sleep where you cook

The floor plan for my old one-bedroom apartment. The floor plan is a line drawing, black lines on a white background. Bedroom, bathroom, living area, and kitchen are labeled.
Defined and distinct zones in the floor plan for my old apartment. Image: DTI Properties.

Helping professionals and social activists are among the many, many kinds of people who really need to pay attention to the space available in their lives for recovery and restoration.

I’m completing my second year in a congregational position where I’ve learned a great deal about community life and what works well for people who serve. Working behind the curtain means seeing much more than I did in my years as a very active lay church member. Those who pour themselves out in service to others must have space and time to gather themselves, and that can’t be optional or there’ll be unnecessary suffering.

I woke up one morning this summer with the phrase “Don’t sleep where you cook” rattling around my head.

Don’t sleep where you cook. 

Give the stove room to breathe, and give yourself the luxury of a bed distinct from the pots and pans. Differentiate between where you prepare nourishment for or with others and where you rest from service with and for them.

It can be especially easy for leaders in faith communities, human services, and non-profit organizations to devote so much energy and attention to worthy causes that reasonable boundaries fail and their activity and rest zones blur. In the name of commitment and dedication, a lot of leaders end up designing their lives more like a studio apartment than a multi-room home.

There are privileges in having paid time off to take or community resources to support our hitting full-stop on the cycle of production: parents and other caretakers know that vacations can involve their own category of work. It’s also a privilege to have new contexts to go to, to relax in, to learn from, and to train in.

But even a studio breaks up its spaces. And while we’re in our home routines, not off-grid, we can practice gentle ways to ensure that we do wholly rest so we can do our best when we return.

Learn from my friend Hugh; help him rest if you can.

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Don’t let it happen to you

An older man in a full-length light-colored trench coat and cap has his back to the camera and looks across the street at a large detached house. The photo is black-and-white with very pronounced shadows.
Photo credit: Frantzou Fleurine

A few years ago, articles about a new book flew around social media.

The book, The Top Five Regrets of the Dying compiled the most frequent regrets of people who were dying. Author Bronnie Ware shared the respondents’ reflections with readers in the spirit of “Don’t let it happen to you.”

The five insights:

  1. I wish I’d had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me.
  2. I wish I hadn’t worked so hard.
  3. I wish I’d had the courage to express my feelings.
  4. I wish I had stayed in touch with my friends.
  5. I wish that I had let myself be happier.” —Bronnie Ware

People at any age can read this list and check themselves, and this is probably why the list resonated with so many hundreds of thousands of people. Readers have shared the Guardian version of this article more than 200,000 times.

As a young professional and business owner, I’ve seen lists very similar to Ware’s end-of-life accounting from entrepreneurs laying down their businesses or retirees laying down their life’s careers. Wherever there’s an ending, there’s an opportunity for reflection and also regret.

“Nothing is as important as your health,” they say. “Cultivate deep interpersonal relationships,” they say. “Give yourself permission to be a human being,” they say.

And it’s all very interesting given how little structural support the United States’ labor law and customs offer us to put these wisdom pearls into practice.

Employees in this country work long hours, and entrepreneurs often work even longer, especially when just launching companies or products. It can take far too long, with costs far too high, for us to claw back some balance, wellness, quality social life, or family time.

How would it be if we didn’t have to push against a culture of overwork in order to live well? Laurie Penny asks this question in an article on the individualistic self-care movement.

The rigors of both work and worklessness, the colonization of every public space by private money, the precarity of daily living, and the growing impossibility of building any sort of community maroon each of us in our lonely struggle to survive. We are supposed to believe that we can only work to improve our lives on that same individual level. Chris Maisano concludes that while ‘the appeal of individualistic and therapeutic approaches to the problems of our time is not difficult to apprehend . . . it is only through the creation of solidarities that rebuild confidence in our collective capacity to change the world that their grip can be broken.'”

Read the rest.