On putting things down

The facilitator caught in a moment of conflict. Her bracelets jangling. She takes a moment and says, caught up in the back and forth of a charge between two people: I'm not so good with speed.

The room softens. Something releases.

I find myself returning to that moment. The candour of it. How much it might have taken to say, in a room that was pulling hard toward urgency - I need to slow down. In a world that favours and privileges speed, interruption can be hard to initiate. But when we do interrupt, we can give space for reflection, review, and the possibility to change direction. Interruption could be said to be at the heart of any therapeutic relationship. Why come to therapy without it - otherwise you just have a nodding sounding board.

Speed itself is a cultural phenomenon. We should be moving at pace, being efficient, productive, useful. Usefulness is something I hear frequently in  therapy rooms. A need to be useful to others, or to somehow prove oneself, and without it what's left of me? This can lead to a kind of stacking of doing - and, not uncommonly, toward burnout - and the business of just being falls away. What might it be to just be? Perhaps a radical act in a time of productivity and busyness. To go slow, to not know, to take a moment - these can feel countercultural. Like falling behind, or apathy.

In gestalt therapy, we call these introjects - or the shoulds. Things we take on from others unquestioningly, absorbing them whole without fully digesting whether they're actually ours. You should be at this stage. Further along. With more to show for it. These voices can sit at the root of anxiety, a low hum of not-quite-enough that follows us through the day. I stay curious about where they come from - not with judgement or scrutiny, but with a softness that neighbours slowness.

I open a book in a bookshop by Chantal Akerman and land on a page where she describes packing a number of books for a trip rather than reading them. The books being too serious. Leaving them out on a wall for people to collect. I notice this reflected in my own experience - the permission to recognise when something is not the right thing, right now. To stay close to what I actually need at any given moment.

With this comes what I can only describe as the permission to give up. Not as apathy, but as an honest recognition: not this, not now, not anymore. What nourishes me, what supports me, what brings me joy - these feel like useful guides when the shoulds get loud. In gestalt therapy, this is sometimes the work: not adding more, but learning to put things down. To recognise what we've taken on that was never really ours to carry - expectations, roles, other people's definitions of who we should be.

I find myself going back to drawing. The economy of the lines, the simplicity, the directness. Without colour, or the technical constraints of other mediums. Just the line, and where it wants to go. I'm curious about what becomes possible through this simplicity. There is a looseness to drawing that gives me room to explore and to map, both imaginative and expansive.

In that mapping I find a little more of my own voice. A little more of my own experience. A carving out of space, that is at once a return to something, but also something new.

I'm curious what you do to give yourself that space.

What are you carrying that isn't yours? What might you put down - or hand back?