Walls

Living builds walls around us, keeping us on a certain course – some we create ourselves and others are put there by the systems within which we exist. Some may be a small fence – easy to step over and even quite pretty, not begrudged at all, a mere marking of boundaries. Others may feel like a 10ft solid stone wall topped with barbed wire impossible for us to ascend. These walls are fluid – they can grow and shrink, appear and topple with situation, company or mood.

Obligations by nature put demands upon us. These can be for our time, money, thoughts, energy and can be entirely voluntary or come from other people, society, living needs or occupation. In times of stress, be these transient or chronic, it can feel like these needs or musts often from outside are crowding us in and leaving us no space for wants or needs of our own.

From my own experience, mental health is improved by feeling we are in control of something, and this is particularly important in times of stress. When the demands upon us exceed the resources available to tackle them it is easy to feel controlled by rather than in control, and this makes us feel we either buckle and sink under it all, or lash out desperate to prove we have some say and take out at least one of these pressures.

Depending on the nature or duration of the stressors and where they sit in our priorities at that time will affect what we cut when we lash out. It may be our education is non-negotiable, so we cut the relationship we tell ourselves isn’t working for us anymore, or maybe our relationships are top of the importance list so we change our jobs or our homes. We may feel hemmed in and express control by throwing everything out – removing clutter and purging it from our homes so our eyes at least tell us we’ve got something in hand, or we may feel unfulfilled and try to fill the space with more things or more pets hoping it brings us back into balance again.

This highly pressured situation in short doses can be healthy for us long term: being under pressure allows us to truly assess the value of something or someone in our lives, and show us the relationships which truly bring us value or where we are investing our energy with little or no return. It can seem harsh weighing up particularly people in terms of what we get out versus what we put in, especially when we know we are highly valued by the other party but each of us has only a finite amount of energy and this amount fluctuates. Some relationships may be able to be put at a distance to be picked up more actively later, others may have changed and are no longer what they once were and cannot continue to be a drain for the sake of what was in the hope it may one day be again. Sometimes we may make a conscious choice to stay in a one-directional energy or compromising partnership especially in the case of ill-health in the other person and make our resource cuts elsewhere but this comes down to personal priorities: we still each only have so much of ourselves to go round.

Like many people I turned to physical minimalism as a result of stress – though I didn’t know what minimalism was at the time – beginning to frantically discard belongings before putting a label to my behaviour. It was a desparate reach for control in chaos and one I have sustained as beneficial: our home has become a refuge for both of us and even visitors who don’t seem to recognise why take a deep breath and relax as they settle into an armchair. I’ve applied it to my work desk and seen productivity improvements there, and with the magnifying glass of the pandemic have been applying similar principles to my relationships and the other demands of modern living. As a downside, I think appreciating clutter-free and open, quiet spaces has made me claustrophobic!

We do not have to be in a crisis of high stress to make decisions about the priorities and investments we make in life – it can be useful as mentioned earlier for making quick decisions without procrastination, but we can carry this awareness out of the storm with us. Recognise a wall is shrinking and not causing us as much stress, but still asking if we want to keep that obligation at all or remove it and replace it with a new one, or let an existing one grow into that space. Fulfilment looks different to all of us, but we all have some influence in growing and directing it in some way – however limited a way that may feel sometimes.