Author: Elder Associates Ltd

Rest and Rebuild

Shift work or no shift work we must sleep. Sleeping is as important as waking. If we do not sleep properly, we cannot wake properly. It follows, therefore, that if we cannot wake properly our life is compromised. We may be half awake when full alertness is required.

A good night’s sleep can be seen as reward for a hard day’s work. The writer of the Book of Ecclesiastes states that, ‘the sleep of a labouring man is sweet’.  The body needs proper sleep in order to rest and rebuild itself for work the following day. A common concern of many shift workers is that if they do not sleep well, they cannot work well.

We certainly turn back the hands of the industrial clock and return the entire world of work to the conventional ‘eight to four’ or ‘nine to five’. But at the same time we cannot compromise the quality of our work and the quality of our family life. We need to take care of ourselves regardless of the weather. A healthy work/live balance must be achieved or else we will put our health in jeopardy. It is indeed backward to diminish the economic gain that shift work was designed to create.

No doubt industrialization, modernization and the onward march of science and technology have brought untold benefits to mankind as regards food production and distribution, control of infectious diseases, global travel, etc., but we cannot allow progress on any front to diminish the benefit of a long and health life.

Everything is food. Great sceneries, the magic of falling in love, exciting projects and productive work teams, playing a good game, healthy relationships and deep spiritual moments are all essential forms of nourishment. They all feed our hunger for life and keep us satisfied. When these nourishing elements of our life are balanced and satisfying, your life feeds you, making what you eat secondary.

 

In the sense that you can prepare the most balanced meals with the best recipes or you can eat broccoli and carrots until the cows come home, you will not be satisfied unless you are nourished with primary food. There is a deep hunger within that we all want to satisfy. This is the hunger for life, a hunger to be well, strong and able, to do what we want and need to do, a hunger to achieve life’s goals and fulfil our potential, a hunger to find meaningful work to do.  Except in environments where there is famine or not enough to eat, primary food must be satisfied first.

 

Interestingly, when we are in love, having fun or even working productively, we lose our appetite for the food on our plate. Our attention is distracted from food. Food, though essential, seems unimportant. In fact, this nourishment from primary food is much more satisfying and nourishing than what is on our plate. The extent to which we can incorporate them will determine how enjoyable and worthwhile our lives feel. At these times we are fed not by the food on our plates but by the energy of our life experiences.

 

The problem arises when we begin stuffing ourselves with secondary food when we are starving for primary food. Weight gain is just one of the consequences. Secondary food cannot satisfy the hunger for primary food. Eating great helpings of food cannot make your unfulfilled career needs disappear or be satisfied. It may be worthwhile to look beyond the food on your plate to those other forms of nourishment that truly feed you.

 

Source: Integrative Nutrition, Feed your Hunger for Health and Happiness, Joshua Rosenthal, 2014, New York, USA

It is almost a human tendency to ‘other’ others.  It happens so regularly in our world today after thousands of years of human living that we take ‘othering’ as normal. To dis people who are different from us in skin colour, hair texture, language, culture, status, money, religious belief or educational achievement is actually discrimination. It is the bias we have against others because they are different from our group. It seems like our group narcissus gene is kicking up and it may  be getting worse.

 

The Oxford English Dictionary describes ‘othering’ as the tendency of members of in-groups to consider members of out-groups to have evolved genetically into different, separate, and inferior species to their own.  The term that matches this concept, pseudospeciation, was first used by Erik Erikson in 1966, according to his biographer, Lawrence J.Friedman. To go a bit further Francisco Gil-White proposed in 2001 that humans evolved in such a way that the brain perceives different ethnic groups to be equivalent to different biological ‘species’, thus suggesting that ‘othering’ is innate. His hypothesis has yet to receive widespread empirical support.  (Current Anthropology, Vol. 42, No. 4, pp. 515–554.) This can explain to some extent the dehumanization of the enemy as a soldier’s rationale as he goes out to war, the treatment of prisoners, or what might be characterized as the murder of  cornered bandits attempting to surrender.

 

We cannot assume that we are classified or even consider ourselves as fully human all our lives.  The many situations of discrimination mentioned above invariably involve some version of  ‘othering’.  Membership in the so-called ‘human community’ is a good bit more exclusive and risky, and apparently revocable,  than we’d like to assume.

 

Interestingly, when I am down with the common cold I don’t feel so human. Much less are people suffering from the darker events such as stroke, paralysis, Alzheimer, which absolutely remind us of how fragile the ‘human regime’ is. How easy it is to lose speech or movement or memory or those other ‘gifts’ we take for granted in our commerce with others and ourselves. This broadcasts in the strongest tones how all living creatures are slated for alterations in mind and body, and it may happen to us. We stand to be ‘othered’ too.

 

This points to the great human opportunity to break down these barriers by establishing verbal communication. Establishing verbal communication is the link that registers the human and elevates all beings to a comparable status. It carries with it loads of benefits. ‘Talking-with’ (not ‘talking-at’ or ‘talking-down’ to) can be translated as the great healing medicine, the great equalizing force,  as it includes and bonds people of every tribe, nation and colour.

Spending time in the garden boosts my mental health. Unlike a few years ago when I shunned the garden, now it is my favourite place to be on weekends, for no other activity engages me so completely while it revives my spirit. Exhausted after a rough week, some people head to the beach, some to the casino, others to the dance hall, church, the bar or the football pitch; for me it is different.

All I do is don my signature cap, coverall, and gloves, saunter to the back of my house into the garden and there, in the quiet of the evening, I am transformed into another person. Tiredness oozes away in this green space. Here I can taste the evening breeze off the hillside and smell the musty grass from yesterday’s mowing.  Right then my wrinkles disappear, my shoulders relax, my lungs fill with oxygen and there is nothing I cannot do. I feel invincible and sometimes even immortal.

I weed, prune, rake leaves, fertilize, set new plants, redo a bed, and design a compost heap; everything becomes possible and easy.  In my garden space the sky appears huge and embracing, and my mind learns how to be at peace.  My body, lean and once strong, conserves energy as I turn from the difficult task, to the easy ones, and back again to the difficult.   I feel as if I am engaged in the miracle of life with things happening all around me.  In the echo of nature’s silence, I experience living things grow: plants inch higher, butterflies flitter, insects crawl on and under the ground with the worms, and birds defend their young.

Amidst this cycle of life my garden multitasks like a miniature universe, filling my heart with gratitude and making me want to give back. In fact, the garden is a giving place; having received from the universe the miracle of fruits and flowers, it is a joy to set plants for the neighbour, share produce, and smile as your elegant anthuriums decorate the Church’s sanctuary.  On each bed, lettuce leaves neatly set like pages in a book, the gardener crafts his sentences with a salad of words.  Visitors would leave my garden with their baskets full.