Chronic health/stress and Kairos

Join me to paint the MUSE

Dear One,

If you happen to have a chronic stress or chronic health condition, please listen because this matters. The hours of your day are not neutral. They’re counting on your body’s clock. Hypervigilance over time wears the body down. You know this, but what you might not know is how much pleasure builds the body back.

Pleasure is not a treat. Pleasure is a counterweight to pain. And here’s why I believe it. Chronos. Chronic. It means with time. So if you have chronic health and chronic stress, it means you’re living with it, inside of it. These words come from the Latin and the Greek. When it first began to enter the human language, it was not about a severity, it was about duration, the time it takes. Chronic, on its own, isn’t something bad. It’s what travels with you. But it’s not a singular event. It’s time itself. And if the condition that you are navigating is having an impact on your life. It’s impacting your time. Not just the quantity of your time, but the quality of your time.

So what if the remedy to Chronos and Chronic is connected with time itself? Think about this for a moment with me. Chronos connects with the brainwave of Beta, what I call busybody beta, and hypervigilance, and also the critic. The critic lives in Chronos. Chronos is sequential, the clock, the calendar, the appointment, the countdown, the quantity. Beta is the brainwave that runs it. Hypervigilance is what beta feels like from the inside when you live in a body that communicates to you about what it is experiencing in languages that are hard to understand and so unpredictable. When you’re always scanning for what’s next, what’s going to bring on the inflammation or the flare, whether or not you feel like showing up for something that you’ve already said yes to. Small example, yesterday I spent quite a few hours feeling creative and lit up and informed. And then suddenly my computer was out of battery and I was in a public place. And I didn’t feel like expending the energy to get up and plug it in. So I just closed it and just sat there instead. I was weighing whether or not it felt worthwhile to find the socket. Because when you’re navigating chronic conditions, sometimes the simple act like plugging in a cord can feel like you don’t want to do it. Are you, like I am sometimes, weighing every move? The weighing itself, the evaluation is not free. Researchers have measured what it does to a body over the years. And this buildup is called allo