Restlessness
The sharks I saw are roving up and down the coast. If the sharks cease roving, if they still their twist and rest for a moment, they die. They need new water pushed into their gills; they need dance.
– Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek
Our oldest daughter said something interesting to me today. We had spent the weekend doing the kind of torturous regimen that she now considers customary: getting up before the crack of dawn to spend most of the chilly, drizzly day in and out of the pool for a swim meet. I expected her to respond with elation to the news that the team would get a day off afterwards, but she said she would miss it. And she would feel the difference when she did get back in a day later.
I thought to myself, she’s become a thing of the water. When she’s not moving through it, she feels it. When I peer into the pool area these days, I can’t even find my children: they’re just part of the host of suited, capped, long-limbed creatures pulling their way to one end of the pool, only to flip and pull their way back to the other. That’s the thing about flip turns: it means you’re always moving, roving, back and forth, like sharks.
I sense this same thing in myself, the need for movement and direction. The need for new water to be pushed through the existential gills of my life. The irony is, I move the entire day, tidying, chopping, cooking, washing, supervising, shuttling kids back and forth in the revolving door of our lives. Two kids out, another kid in; one kid out, three kids in, in a game of logistical Tetris which my husband and I have gotten pretty strategic at playing.
But that’s not the kind of movement I crave. You can be doing a lot but going no where. You can be surrounded by activity without being moved in the ways that give you life.
During my last spiritual retreat, I asked myself, when do I feel most alive? I feel most alive when I am growing and learning. When I am being challenged by new material and knowledge, when I am reflecting and relating in a way that brings that knowledge to life. When I can share all of that with someone else. That’s the movement and direction that my soul and my mind needs.
When I don’t have that, an inner restlessness emerges. Has this happened to you? —an inner restlessness that arises from an unmet need, which you may or may not have even acknowledged to yourself? It’s like I’m trying to find something to move through, something to fill my gills and give me a semblance of life: scrolling through streaming options to find something worth watching. Mindlessly surfing social media or online shopping options. Escaping into some form of entertainment that was probably not worth my while.
These are default behaviors. The key is, I’ve found, to do something which jolts me out of them: get out of the house for a walk. Take a bath. Turn on some music. The key is to face that restlessness, straight-on, to be as self-aware as my daughter who knows she needs to move in a way that she enjoys and that has become part of who she is. Because the fact is, it’s quite possible to be doing all the things you know are vocationally important to your life but not be moved in the ways that give you life. Sometimes, we can find those things or make time for them. Other times, we sit with the restlessness for a while and wait.
And here is where the metaphor ends, because we don’t perish in the waiting. In fact, the waiting can unearth things about who we are and what we are enlivened by that are quite valuable to figuring our lives out. It can reveal the quality and substance of our faith and our hopes and our motives, in ways that themselves lead to growth, if we let it.
