Last year, just before my final exams, I teetered dangerously close to the edge of burnout. I remember at one point sitting on the floor of my dorm room, feeling like I didn’t have an ounce of focus or creativity left in me. We still had full days of classes which I was juggling with studying for exams, getting my health coaching diploma on the side and trying to stick to my workout routine. I craved respite. I knew I needed to realign, but without losing ground. At that point, I didn’t have the luxury of taking time off, but I also didn’t have the luxury of completely burning out and throwing away everything I had worked for. One early morning as the sun rose over Coetzenburg, I ran my usual route up Jonkershoekweg while listening to a podcast on active recovery. Then it hit me: that’s exactly what I needed in my life – to recover on the move, to recuperate while still facing my inevitable to-do list.
Active recovery is a term used in the sporting world to designate an activity done during a period of recuperation. The important part is that it differs from the sport you usually do. There’s a break in your routine. In running, this would look like taking a week off from regular training and switching to swimming, Pilates or yoga. You’re recovering, but you are still moving. Wouldn’t it be beautiful if we could apply that to life?
That following week after listening to that podcast, I tweaked my daily routine to allow more space for rest. But “active recovery” will look different for everybody. For me, it meant trading in my sunrise runs for an extra hour in bed spent reading (not books related to my degree, but for fun). It looked like taking a thirty-minute nature break in the middle of the day without touching a textbook or my phone. I would grab a rooibos cappuccino and find a sunny spot on the lawn outside the library, taking off my shoes, closing my eyes and turning my face to the sky. I vacated the study material from the desk in my room, regulating all academic activities to the library and only coming home when my work was done. During the day, I focussed on work and limited all social contact. In the evenings, however, I would attend yoga or Zumba classes and invite all my friends to join, adding some serotonin to the endorphin rush. I achieved active recovery by compartmentalising.
In his beautiful book, Think Like a Monk, Jay Shetty wrote that “time has memory and space holds energy.” In other words, if you do something every day at the same time, your body will instinctively start to crave that activity when the time comes. Time cradles the memory of your habits. Similarly, if you designate a particular space in your house for creative production, another for rest and another for academic work, then eventually, just being in that space can prime your mind for the right kind of focus. So, rather than letting work seep into every aspect of my life, I consciously decided to not take my class notes to bed, to not eat at my desk, to keep my computer shut during lunch, and to write poetry beneath the trees. I respected the particular vitality of each space and allowed myself the natural flow of different modes of being. For me, at that particular moment in my life, active recovery meant relishing slower mornings, enjoying low-impact movement, muting notifications, and sparing myself the mental exertion of the blurry work-life non-divide.
For you, it might be something completely different. Perhaps you are someone who is always late and perpetually in a rush; maybe you feel overwhelmed because you spend your days oscillating between cramming before a deadline, oversleeping and wasting precious hours. For you, active recovery might mean waking up earlier, building some movement into your days, trading alcohol for tea for a while, going to bed earlier and planning out your days. For someone else, it might actually be more nourishing to take a night off, make pasta, drink a glass of wine and watch a movie. The success of this little experiment lies in doing something different, in vacating your own personal mundane. And because suffering is so singular and diverse, recovery is also a beautiful plethora of possibilities.
I recently had a conversation with a friend about the strange phenomenon of retirement. Chalk it up to our youth, but we were both perplexed at the notion of ever wanting to cease working. For us, to stop working would be like robbing life of purpose. I realise that not all jobs can be successfully done deep into old age and that many people spend their retirement years exploring other passions and finding another sense of purpose. But for me, for instance, I dream of spending my life writing, reading, and hopefully lecturing at old ivy-covered universities. I can’t imagine ever wanting to not do that. It’s so integral to my being that having to stop would be akin to giving up on life. My friend agreed and said she felt the same way about her work. The conversation meandered to the conclusion that perhaps the best way of making a living is to build active recovery into our daily lives, in other words, resting now and not procrastinating on recovery until there is nothing left to bounce back from; to work hard, but always to rest well. If you keep grinding until the age of sixty, then it makes sense that you’ll need the rest of your life to recover. By contrast, if you find purpose in what you do, toil meaningfully at the limits of your capabilities and replenish your energy in sustainable ways, then you could find yourself producing some of your best work late in life.
It is our responsibility to create pockets of peace and beauty in our days, to voyage into awe, as I mentioned in a previous post. This begins with just noticing life, focusing on feeling it more fully and allowing yourself moments of slowness. A softer life starts with periods of active recovery. So, if you are feeling overwhelmed at the moment, give yourself a reset week. Try something new. Experiment with your habits. It can start with something as small as lighting candles at dinner, playing classical music while you work or adding lemons to your water. And if you still need inspiration, let me tell you about the businessman by the river.
One of my running routes leads me through busy Dorp Street, over the Boord bridge and down a raggedy stone staircase all the way to the Eersterivier. From there, a cobblestone footpath winds along the river, beckoning ambling pedestrians with the shade of the overarching oak trees and the rich green hues of the wisteria. On Wednesday, I had quite a busy schedule, so I squeezed my daily run in during lunchtime instead of late afternoon. When I reached the river path at around 12.30, I passed a man in smart office work attire, sitting on a rock eating a sandwich and sipping from a takeaway cup of coffee. He looked unhurried, relaxed. That’s what I mean when I say create pockets of peace. He could easily have decided to take lunch at his desk or grab a quick bite at a busy coffee shop, but he took the little walk down from Dorp Street to spend his lunchtime watching the rush of the river and imbibing the slow inhalations of the trees. Isn’t that beautiful? That’s one thing I consistently try to incorporate into my days – the outside. Nature always reminds me to slow down. She shows me how.
Whether you are craving recovery but don’t have the time to go on holiday or simply looking for small sustainable ways to build life into your living, you can always start by bringing more of the outside inside. That’s called reconnecting. Why? Because we are the outside. We are nature. If you feel some nameless longing in your bones or itching underneath your skin, perhaps it’s just your body begging you to reconnect to its source of vitality. Nourish your heart. It doesn’t have to be grand gestures or long weekends; it doesn’t even have to curtail your productivity (in fact, it will probably boost it.) You just have to tap into the softness that exists as veiled possibilities in every moment. Listen to nature and your body – they’ll show you how.
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