Sorry if the left-hand picture is a bit sqeamy. These are my son’s fingers on Saturday night
How often do we think we are too busy for self-care? How often are we too busy doing something to just spend time out to look after ourselves?
This on Saturday evening was a classic example. We were visiting my son and his wife, had just watched the rugby and son was cooking us beef nachos. I love my son’s cooking so was looking forward to it. Anyway whilst cooking his hand got splashed with hot fat. Instead of stopping cooking, running it under cold water for 10-20 mins and then taking stock of whether he needed to do anything he kept on cooking. It was only when we were all eating that he put his hand into a bowl of cold water. He carried on doing this on and off as we all ate and watched Crufts on TV. We then went back to our Airbnb. We’d just got in when my husband’s phone ran and it was daughter-in-law asking if husband could run son to A&E as he was in tears with his hand. The reason it was my husband who had to go was because he was the only one who had not had a couple of drinks whilst eating so was most definitely under the legal alcohol limit.
Turns out it was a pretty substantial burn and the fingers are still bandaged today!
But it got me thinking on how many times we feel like we need to keep going when we should stop. When there is that pain in chest or knee or headache or niggle and we just needed to stop, to breath, to rest a while but we keep going and have a fall, a heart attack, are rushed to hospital? Or we can feel something getting under our skins and know that if we stay in that environment much longer we will explode but we stay, have a huge row, say words we can’t unsay?
It would have been much better with my son, even if he had had to go to hospital anyway to have gone at 7pm rather than midnight. But I think we all do it. We all feel that we need to push through.
Why is it so hard to stop? Why is it so hard to put ourselves first? What are we afraid we’ll miss out on if we say Yes to the boss when we should say No? Or if self-employed keep ploughing on when time out to walk and ponder, to ask God/The Universe what needs to come next? Or if we do we have to justify it. We struggle to just rest, just to say “I’m ‘running my burn under the cold tap’“ [metaphor for so much there I think]
So I think I am going to challenge both myself and you, my reader, to have a look at what our ‘burn’ is, that thing that really hurts but we think we shouldn’t make a fuss about, and then what would our ‘cold tap’ be that would soothe so we don’t have to be rushed to A&E.
Aspirational Adventures 