Every day for as long as we live if we are lucky we engage in various activities. Eating, sleeping, personal hygiene, are a few of the basics which occupy our time and attention. Depending upon our age we these basics will be performed differently and will probably look different. If we are old such as myself, hygiene includes trimming hairs from my ears, an activity I did not need to do when I was in my 20s and 30s, and one I wish I still did not need to do. Shaving is another thing that has been different over my life. When I was younger, because my hair grew slowly and sparsely I only needed to shave twice a week. As I got older into my 40s it changed and I needed to shave every day. Now that I’m retired I’m back to shaving about twice a week, because no one cares if I have a stubble.
Work activities are also changing as we age or even as we change jobs. During our younger and middle years we may find our jobs, as a means for providing income, occupies great chunks of our time daily, weekly, and monthly. As we get older that intensity of work may decline even if the physical actions might become more difficult and strenuous due to changes in our bodies.
Eating habits change over lifetimes, perhaps for the better or perhaps not. Reading likes and dislikes may change. Physical ability certainly changes and not always simply because of aging, perhaps an injury caused a permanent change. Every thing in our lives is subject to change. This is of course a Buddhist belief that there is no thing which remains unchanged forever, including oursleves.
So while all of those thing are changing the needs of nourishment to our spirit, our well being, or our wholeness also changes. The notion of self-care, which is experiencing a growing awareness, is vital to our continued well being, our sanity even. Subtle changes occur to our personality, our responses to environmental changes, our relationships to name a few are all connected to how well we take care of our self.
Self-care is often confused with or thought of as being selfish. It is sometimes thought that if I take care of myself then I am not taking care of someone else. And that someone else may be a spouse, a child, a sick family member or friend. Yet self-care is not being selfish.
In my work as a chaplain I would remind folks that what happens to the person you are caring for if you become sick or unable to do the things you do? In fact those we may care for require us to take care of ourselves also.
It’s not always about taking care of someone sick though. In relationships such as marriage or raising children the other person may not be sick, they may be perfectly healthy yet you are part of a team so to speak and that team requires you to be whole and healthy for it to function in a normal healthy fashion. If you are inattentive to a spouse then that sows the seeds for discontent, and if it’s a child then there may be behavioral issues. There may, depending upon the degree that one’s self is not whole, be trauma done to the situation.
Here is where balance is important. There is a fine line, one which each of us needs to find for ourselves between fulfilling all of our many responsibilities outside of our self and the responsibility within one’s self. For too much self-care can indeed become selfish, and even too little self-care can be also selfish.
The Eightfold Path in Buddhism offers us many ways of examining our lives through the lens of skillfulness. Developing the capacity to see into the actions and the outcomes seeking to walk the line between doing good and avoiding harm. The degree we are able to, with skill, walk the middle path between harm and good has a direct impact on our physical being as well as our spiritual and psychological or mental well being.
Balance is about doing the least harm while accomplishing the greatest good.
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