Emotional sustainability

Yesterday I did something I loved until I hated it. That is, I overdid it. I started out on a task that I was eager to take up—reading through a whole stack of stories that had just come in from the Congo story project I’m working on, doing a triage on which ones had promise for including in the book. There were a lot of them—this project is ballooning out of control. And they were still in French. The translators working on this project are, understandably, running out of steam.

I really wanted to look over this final enormous batch of new material ASAP because publishing deadlines loom. And I do love this project. So I set everything aside and started reading and sorting. By late afternoon I had a headache. I was seeing less merit in each story I skimmed. But I really wanted to finish so I pushed on. In the end, it was yoga class that forced me to quit, with only 5 stories to go,

By the time I got back from yoga I couldn’t bear to look at those last stories. Even this morning I was reluctant to take them up. It seems that, in pushing myself at the end, depending on sheer willpower, I squandered the joy that had fueled me earlier.

Joy is a precious commodity. This experience made me think about the importance of something my daughter brought up the other day: emotional sustainability. In all our talk of sustainability for the earth, which requires both personal, lifestyle changes and major political changes, we forget what is needed to fuel those changes. It all requires a great deal of emotional energy. How do we sustain that kind of energy?

For some the energy may come from anger, but long-term anger eats at the soul. For me the energy must come from love and joy. However, what it often comes down to is guilt and duty. We do what we know we should do, and we depend on willpower to power us through.

Recent studies have shown what we all know from our own experience: that willpower is actually a limited commodity. If you use your willpower on one task you will have less for another. If you force yourself to do something you will eventually hate it and your efforts will backfire.

Instead of depending on willpower when the joy runs out, we should carefully protect and enhance the joy, never squandering it—especially when it fuels work that is right and good.

Here is Joanna’s example. She was doing laundry. It was a beautiful day and she normally hangs clothes outside to dry. This gives her pleasure on many levels—kinetic, aesthetic, and ecological. But that day she was tired and stressed and the thought of carrying the wet clothes up the steps was a last straw. She thought she really should—it was, after all, a beautiful day and this practice was good for the earth. “But if I had hung the clothes out then, I would have hated doing it and I didn’t want to hate it,” she said. “So I threw them in the dryer.”

I’m making a list of the things I love to do that I know are good for the earth, myself, my family and friends, or future generations—including writing this blog. And I am going to carefully protect the joy that surrounds those tasks.

I, too, love to hang clothes out to dry.