“Breaking Down” by Meenakshi Bhatt
Meenakshi Bhatt lives in India. She writes a blog on Medium. She likes writing poetry, short stories, and essays. Her short story My Garden was published in Cornice magazine. She has worked as part of the Carbon Almanac Network, a team of creatives and researchers that author Seth Godin created to prepare his latest almanac on environmental issues.
A Word from the Author:
Caught up in our daily lives, we often do not pay attention to nature and the lessons it can teach us. Now and then, nature displays its immense power and we are forced to take notice. On such a stormy day, I happened to pay attention and learned a valuable lesson.
Breaking Down
Not long ago, my husband and I were about to go on a morning walk. The sky was overcast with clouds. The rain seemed imminent. However, we told ourselves, “We don’t intend to go far. It looks like we still have a few minutes of dry weather left”. We were wrong.
The wind started blowing furiously just as we stepped out into the open. Next came the rain. We retreated to the safety of our apartment complex. The stairs in our apartment complex are partially shielded from the elements and afford a clear view of the outside. We sat on the stairs and watched the wind perform it’s frenzied dance.
The wind whipped the trees around. The branches of some trees broke and some others came perilously close to losing a part of their foliage. In the sky, the clouds blew past at an unusually rapid rate. Sitting where we were, we were not in danger but the gods were certainly making themselves visible and audible. That experience got me thinking about the way nature does its housekeeping. Things that get too big to be managed are broken down to a manageable size, time and time again.
Why doesn’t nature endow us, humans, with the same capacity to intermittently shed our excessive burdens? Why are we obsessed with incessant growth and constant productivity?
It is not nature that is to blame.
We, too, get tired of the daily grind. We, too, get exhausted from jobs that appear repetitive and meaningless. We have just lost the ability to pick up these cues. All our lives we have been swamped by messages that exhort us to keep going at any cost. We have been told we can do anything if we try hard enough. In this modern way of living, there is neither the time nor the inclination to listen to the voice of nature.
We work even when we are tired. We use stimulants to stay awake far longer than our body would allow us. We eat beyond fullness. We exercise despite the pain. We continue to remain in jobs and relationships that make us feel unsafe and exhausted.
Similarly, the systems we live in and work in refuse to heed the signs of overload. The productivity that is expected of us is often beyond human physical capacity. Even when it is physically achievable, our minds are incapable of all the cognitive load that is heaped upon us. This unnatural exhaustion is then termed burnout. Vacations, meditation, mindfulness, and medications are advised as solutions when the only logical solution is to stop making unnatural demands of people.
When individuals and systems stretch themselves beyond the breaking point, they break. It is natural. It is time to slow down and notice the hints that nature keeps giving us. It is time to do regular course corrections, if not at the systemic level, then at least at the individual level. It is time to opt out of lifestyles and situations that demand perpetual superhuman effort from us.
