If
you ever wondered why you feel guilty taking time off, even when you’re sick,
you have no farther to look than the wrapper on your Hall’s cough drop. “A pep
talk in every drop” is printed in small blue capital letters on the reverse
side of each wrapper along with little “pep talks.” Each cough drop has a different set of admonitions, the way
fortune cookies have different fortunes:
“Be unstoppable,” my most recent cough drop said, as well as, “Turn ‘can
do’ into ‘can did.’” And, worst of all:
“Push on!”
It’s
easy to make fun of Hall’s cough drops, but of course they’re just mirroring the
good old Protestant work ethic and what the whole society, from your bossy mother-in-law
on down, has to say. And I’m sure the people who came up with this promotion strategy think they’re
helping people, the way your mother-in-law (not to blame mother-in-laws, but I
have to pick somebody to use as an example) thinks she’s helping you when she
tells you how to raise your kids, clean your house, or ask your boss for a
raise.
But still. Do we really want or need to tell
ourselves, “Push on!” when we’re coughing so much we need to open and eat a
Hall’s menthol cough drop? What we
probably really need are cough drops that say, “Relax, take it easy,” or
“Stop! Go back to bed.” Or, “You’re sick! Don’t you dare go to work.”
A couple of weeks
ago I spent the weekend hanging out with my friend’s nine-year-old son while my
friend and her husband went out of town.
From three o’clock on Friday afternoon to ten o’clock on Monday morning
(I was supposed to go home on Sunday evening but my friends’ flight was delayed),
I did nothing but play games, read kids’ books, watch Phineas and Ferb
episodes, eat, and go to bed early.
My friend’s son is normally allowed forty-five minutes of screen time a day
but we asked for and received the special dispensation that he could spend as
much time playing video games as he wanted that weekend if he was playing the
game with me. This was my idea. It was also my idea to go to the video game
store and buy a copy of Pacman, the original game, for two or more people, since
that’s the only video game I know how to play or have ever enjoyed. We played game after game of it,
alternately shrieking with fear and joy, depending on whether our Pacman was
getting away from or getting squashed by the red, pink, turquoise, and orange ghosts.
We also played Donkey Kong, Super
Mario, and 2012 Olympic table tennis on Nintendo Wii. I laughed so hard when we were playing virtual table tennis
I almost peed my pants, because the ball that I was trying to virtually serve
kept falling to the ground at my virtual feet while the virtual crowd in the
cartoon Olympic audience stands roared. “I’m glad those people aren’t real so I
don’t have to be embarrassed,” I said to my friend’s son and that made us laugh
even more.
I
rested and had more fun than I’ve had for years. But at the same time I kept noticing myself feeling a kind of
low-level discomfort over the fact that I wasn’t being productive. I kept getting this queasy naughty
anxious feeling and when I examined it I found it was about stuff I should have
been, could have been, doing just then instead of what I was doing: I actually found myself at one point
feeling bad that I wasn’t sewing buttons on a fall jacket (which has been
missing some buttons for years and for which I recently bought buttons and a
little sewing kit). I
kept feeling guilty.
So there it is. Guilt. In this case it was my guilt, but all of us have it to one degree or another. It gets in the way of us resting, it ruins our fun, it
makes us take on more than we can do. It causes us to make promises we kill
ourselves trying to keep. It might be what makes us feel like we have to be busy
all the time in order to justify our existences. Where does it come from? It probably doesn’t really matter. It comes from everywhere and
nowhere. It comes from the
messages we received as kids, from TV ads and our role models and the
Protestant work ethic; it can even come from the inside of our Hall’s menthol
cough drop wrappers.
I’m
not suggesting we should try to make ourselves stop feeling guilty. We probably couldn’t even if we tried,
so let’s not feel guilty about feeling guilty. But we can harness our time
so that we don’t have to feel guilty about squandering our time, so that rest
becomes something we do instead of everything we’re not doing, so that we pay
attention to what we’re actually getting done instead of thinking we’re not
doing anything, not doing enough, and then feeling more and more guilty.
-- Mary Allen
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