Recently I was out of commission for a few days due to an unexpected reaction to a drug I’m taking for ALS. I could do nothing but sleep. I couldn’t imagine I would ever get enough. But each time I woke, I was seized with panic. I had things to do, deadlines to meet, a blog to write; I was falling behind. I needed to stop all this resting and get busy again. I couldn’t give myself permission to let the reaction play itself out, trusting my energy would return.

The truth is, nothing was going to fall apart in my world in a couple of days. My son is launched and out of the house; my husband is self-sufficient; my work can wait. I’m not really so necessary to anyone. But apparently, much to my dismay, despite having a fatal disease I, like a huge percentage of people in this country, am still hung up on productivity. To some degree, this is understandable: I want to maximize the limited time I have left and complete various writing projects that are underway while I still have the manual dexterity to do so. But didn’t I, in one of the blogs I wrote a while back, disavow that treadmill commitment to getting things done, and more, didn’t I disavow the need to still prove myself in some way, to demonstrate that I’m still in the stream of life, still in the race, still to be taken seriously? It’s turning out to be harder to opt out of the productivity treadmill than I thought. There are so many people out there I don’t want to disappoint.

I fantasize about how wonderful it would be to be able to offload the compulsion associated with getting things done. I drive daily on a busy one-way street where there’s a man who routinely sits in front of his apartment complex on a strip of grass, watching the world go by. He is always there, summer, fall, winter, spring, not visibly occupied by anything but watching the traffic, the pedestrians, and, for a while, a homeless camp that had gone up across the street. Watching. Just watching. I think about this man a lot. I envy him. I want to sit on my front porch as he does, in accepting repose, watching the world pass by. But how do I get there?

Meditation has helped alleviate my sense of urgency associated with ticking off a to-do list. The time out calms me and helps me, for a certain period of time, to see the absurdity of the human rat-race. It keeps me laughing later. But I came to meditation in the last decade and would not consider myself a veteran, and I am not consistently able to carry the effects into all aspects of my life. The imprint of many years of ambition and striving are difficult to counteract.

Napping is another strategy I’ve used for stepping away for a bit and reminding myself that my presence isn’t essential. I learned to nap as a young mother. When I knew I was at the end of my rope and needed some shut-eye, I made sure my son was being supervised by someone, and I put in earplugs, put on a sleeping mask, and I said to myself: No one needs me for twenty minutes. Amazingly I was able to fall asleep and awaken in exactly twenty minutes, feeling fully refreshed. And everyone who I thought depended on my presence had been able to function perfectly well without me.

I have always loved hearing the story of Winston Churchill’s famous daytime sleeping ritual. Despite being a major world leader, he would routinely disappear in the afternoon, change into pajamas, get into bed, and nap for an hour or two. He returned to work full-bore and claimed to get twice as much done as a result of his naps. JFK followed his example, as did General MacArthur. I have always wondered if the ability of these powerful men to take time out in the middle of the day—we’re talking hours here, not twenty minutes—was due to hubris or humility.

To me, there is a lesson in humility in stepping away to sleep or meditate or watch the traffic go by. To be able to step away requires a glimmer of understanding of one’s small place in the world, an understanding that the lives we’re living pass by in the mere blink of an eye, not discernible at all in geological time. We are not more than an aggregate of atoms temporarily assembled, eventually destined to be part of something else, like maybe a distant star.

I try to think of this fundamental reality when my to-do list doesn’t get ticked off at the end of a day. I try to forgive myself. I move more slowly these days. My gait is wobbly; the middle and ring fingers of my left hand stick together, making my typing a bit less speedy and accurate. I try to tell myself it’s okay, what needs to get done will get done. But forgoing productivity and fully embracing the humility required in the face of ebbing strength is, I can see, an ongoing project of my remaining days. Maybe not just for me.

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