Thoughts on Restoring A Weary (and Distracted) Mind

We’ve had another squall of a storm here in England, and the old tree out my window creaks and sways in the sea wind. But the air in my tiny writing room is, for once, still. And I, oh so rarely, sit in the quiet entirely alone. The light slants through the latticed panes, my journal lies open, my heart restless for creativity. But my mind is a beehive of distraction. My eyes feel unable to rest. My thoughts leap here and there, yearning for a set path, yet unable to find one. And I meet, once again, my deep need to find a way to restore and hush my weary, distracted mind.

If there is one thing I find most achingly difficult about motherhood, it is the lack of solitude. The deep quiet of long contemplation is the native air in which my imagination comes to life, in which my soul wakes, sniffs the air, and leaps to joyous activity. With two adored but demanding little ones about, that kind of time simply isn’t available in this season. The time I get is fractured, snatched during naptime or on my husband’s day off, and I often feel my mind is so fractured once I reach it, I barely know what to do with the space I have.

This is, I know, a season of profound self gift as I invest in the souls of my children. This is good. I choose it. I love it.

But my own heart needs still to breathe, and learning the work of a different pattern of soul breath has been my fixation in the last few weeks.

My thoughts have grown more urgent as I’ve come to an increasing awareness that the handy little screens we all carry these days offer an instant and alluring point of focus for a weary mind. In the long nights and small hours, in the bored stretches of afternoon, the turn to my phone is so easy a way to feel a touch of adult connection, a fleeting instant of inspiration or information.

That’s fine, perhaps. There’s a place for it, a goodness in the connection those little screens can offer. And yet.

In my exhaustion, I notice myself turning to the screen in a compulsive way, a comprehensive way, checking and rechecking this and that site or app for something new to excite me, turning to it for comfort in my moments of depression, as company in my loneliness, as the source of answers for every question I have.

I find myself using it as, dare I say it, a replacement for the Holy Spirit. As if it could answer all my questions and comfort my anxiety and keep me company in the dark nights and sate the hungers of my soul. And I become so trained to it’s pattern of leaping from this image to that fragment of text, that my mind becomes even more restless, fragmented, trained to restlessness rather than peace so that even my quiet moments become bereft of stillness. The screen doesn’t really offer me rest. It offers distraction, but not recollection. And my thoughts are only further fragmented, leaving me scattered in attention, and with an inward kind of exhaustion far more draining even than the outward and physical.

So I have begun to fight for the restoration of my weary mind.

But it has to begin in grace. This is no time for legalism (and yes, I do still use my phone!). I need grace and I need to be gentle to a self already overspent in the love of my young ones. As I’ve mulled this all, I remembered what Andy Crouch wrote about the way that change takes place, not by merely saying ‘no’ to a wrong thing, but ‘yes’ to a new, creative, engaging thing.

‘Behold, I will do something new’ says our restorative God. So, by jove, and by way of restoration, will I. I will create new spaces and rhythms for my mind. What, then do I need?

I need the opened window of centred attention.
I need the inrush of cold air quiet even in spurts of a minute.
I need companions of imagination and prayer to take me by the hands and lead me to my centre.
I need tangible ways of reconnection that replace and combat the busyness in my mind and it’s temptation to screens.
I need bite-size gifts of beauty that fit my brief moments alone and I need to keep them in all the places I sit to rest, to nurse, to work.

How, then, may I claim it? I’ve wrestled out several ‘rules’ for myself to follow, a scaffolding on which to build my new patterns:

I must savour silence
I’ve realised that my first need is just to learn once more to sit and be quiet. To let still moments be… still. Somewhere along the way I fell into the habit of thinking that each moment needed to be filled, my mind engaged or my body busy, and the phone (because the internet and its technologies are limit-less) agreed. But ‘be still and know’ says God. I need to remember the way that a quiet instant can be a gift, a summons to attention that allows the whole of body and self to breathe. Now, I’m learning to let the quiet deepen when it comes, to look out the window, to breathe…

I must walk with words.
In this season of brief moments, I’ve found afresh the gift both of liturgy and poetry as a particular kind of language that helps to ‘stab my spirit broad awake’. Words weave worlds, I’ve always said. The words we read and speak quicken our sight, focus our thoughts, frame our vision of the world. And when we are exhausted, drained of deep thought or the words we need to express our longing, the words of others offer us sustaining companionship. I find such rich friendship in praying the liturgies spoken by countless Christians through the ages. When I nurse Samuel to bed at night, I whisper a few words from this version of Compline, or use the morning liturgy from Celtic Daily Prayer to attempt a brief quiet time in the morning. Poetry, so often sized just right to a minute or two of solitude, is potent, swift, a beam of language stabbing into my dusty brain like a beam of sunlight. A few lines of Mary Oliver, or a Herbert sonnet, allow me a freshened vision that alters the whole of the morning.

I must make prayer practical.
Months ago, in the haze of both dissertation writing and early pregnancy, I spoke with a spiritual mentor about both my yearning to create (and my inability to sustain) a life of regular, deep prayer. The speed of deadlines, the demand of my little one, the busyness of the student life, the rigours of pregnancy all conspired to make prayer a difficult thing for me to practice. I thought he might give me a mini lecture on contemplation, on increased discipline. Instead, he gave me a list of activities that felt almost childlike. He told me that I should use every little means available to me to hep me pray. Write out the prayer of a writer I loved. Hold a cross in my hand. Wear a bracelet to remind me of God’s presence. Kneel. Sing. Choose a colour every morning and let each sight of it throughout the day prompt me to a breath prayer. So I’ve copied out prayers by St. Aquinas and Elizabeth Goudge. I wear a prayer bracelet with a tiny cross, given me years ago by an Orthodox friend. I make the sign of the cross as I begin to pray, as a means of engaging the whole of myself, weary body and restless mind, in conversation with the Almighty.

I must shelter in story.
In moments of exhaustion and crisis throughout my life, stories have always kept me in hope. We are, as I have written at length, storyformed people, living beings told into existence by the Word, our own lives dynamic and actual stories in which we play the hero or heroine, the villain or fool. But we lose sight of this reality when we are exhausted or discouraged. We lose the capacity to imagine ourselves as agents, capable of, as Rowan Williams puts it in his book on Dostoevsky’s fiction, a kind of ‘authorship’ in our own lives. In those seasons, stories are medicinal. They heal our shortened sight and open the horizons of imagination while also allowing us a space of mental relaxation. So I’ve been returning to old and beloved authors, seeking out new ones too. I’m re-reading My Antonia! by Willa Cather, listening to new novels as Audiobook. I’ve ordered a novel (Knight’s Fee) by Rosemary Sutcliffe set in the countryside where I now live, plus a new novel by Shawn Smucker that I’ve heard praised in several trustworthy quarters. These books will rest and shelter me, quickening my capacity to imagine, to act, to enjoy the world in my own current chapter.

I must engage in Scripture.
If stories are my shelter, Scripture is the one great story I need to remind me of my origin (called into being as the beloved of God) and my end (sharer in the divine life, co-creator, agent of beauty). Quiet times and prayer. The first things that fall away in seasons of disorientation and exhaustion. The first things I reclaim when I get on my mental feet. But there’s space for creativity even here! I’m now keeping coloured pens with my Bible, helping myself to interact with my daily passages (usually read while nursing Samuel) by marking the words that blaze out to me. Even more fun? I’m letting David Suchet read two chapters of the Bible aloud to me every day… I can’t recommend this highly enough!

This may, perhaps, be one of the more rambly, practical posts I’ve written in many a day. It took two naptimes and one hour of husbandly generosity to finish and thus is rather haphazard in construction. But the healing of our minds, the centering of soul and consciousness, is something I think we must all fight to claim in the modern world. Our limits these days are so few, but our exhaustion so constant, our distraction unceasing. So I offer these ramblings as encouragement to the pilgrims who tread the old road, the precious old road, to quiet. Who yearn to listen, like me, to what grows in the music of real silence. Who struggle uphill to reach for freshened vision and clear sight…