Keep Going, Don't Stop - And Other Lies I've told myself
If my family had a motto growing up, it would be - Keep going, Don’t stop. If we could go back in time, we probably would have carved it into a piece of live-edged birch and hung it on the wall by the dinner table so we could all see it while we ate. Or maybe, we'd put it on a plaque and hang it above the door, so we'd be reminded of our mantra before we left the house and joined in on the world around us.
We keep going; we don’t stop.
When I was young and would fall and scrape my knee, I would be told to walk it off. When I was a teenager, I came upstairs to tell my dad that I wasn’t feeling well. The response? “Ugh, sorry to hear that, bud…well…you better get your stuff; we’re leaving to drop you off at work soon.” When I was in college, I worked at a moving company, and by the time I got home from my third day of work, I couldn’t even open my beer because my carpal tunnel was so bad. The advice I got? “Grind it out, and you can find something better next year.”
It became so ingrained in my life that I didn’t even have to think about it. We keep going; we don’t stop. Work hard, play harder. Never let them see you sweat. When you get knocked down, you get right back up…right away.
About ten years ago, I went on a three-day ski trip. My buddies and I got to the hill, dropped our gear, grabbed our rentals, and headed for the slopes. We went easy on the first run. Apparently too easy because after that first run, it was decided that we’d had enough practice and it was time for the big guns. The double black diamond.
A quick confession? I was on skate skis for the first time. Until that point, I had only been a terrible snowboarder a handful of times, and I had never skied before.
Well, wouldn’t you know it, on the second run of the first day of a three-day ski trip, I fractured my collarbone about 25 feet from the top of that double-black diamond hill. We had a two-year-old at home at the time, so you can imagine my wife’s reaction (😡). She asked if I wanted her to get some family to come in the mornings that she was working so they could help me get our son off to daycare before I went to work. "Naaaaaaa," I said, “I’ll be fine...after all, we keep going; we don't stop."
A couple of days later, my wife was gone to work, and I was getting our son into my car when he slipped out of my one-handed grasp and took off down our street towards a busy intersection. I rushed after him, got to the end of the driveway and went to turn when my feet hit a patch of ice and met the sky. I came down right on my arm that was in a sling—fully breaking it this time.
So what did I do?
I got my son, put him in the car, dropped him off at daycare and went to work.
We keep going. We don’t stop.
I’m willing to bet you do some version of this as well. You witness something really hard at work. So you put your head down and work even harder. You're scrolling social media, and you see a meme that strikes you in the wrong way. So you get heated up and watch those fingers heat up the keyboard. You hear someone make a comment about vaccines or masks that you vehemently disagree with. So instead of reflecting on their words, you turn the burner up on high and watch as all your feelings and emotions come to a boil.
It's one of the reasons the pandemic stopped us in our tracks. We had to stop. Whether you worked through the past few years or not, life changed. You couldn't go into some of the stores that you wanted to. We missed vacations, proms, frosh weeks, graduations, baptisms, funerals, weddings, and the list goes on and on. And when the pandemic hit, it forced us to stop. The world, in so many ways, shut down. And let's be really honest here; it was freaking scary. Both the information coming at us, but also the idea of stopping!
When we stop, we think about all of those things that we’ve shoved under the carpet. Years and years of shoving shit under the carpet. It’s when we stop that we realize that we, too, are broken.
So we didn’t stop for long. We started learning how to zoom friends, family, and colleagues. We started working more. We learned silly tik tok dances, made sourbread starter, and renovated the house.
And yet, it didn’t help. It didn’t help with all of those feelings and emotions we had.
I did something similar about six years ago. Not stopping for me was a badge of honour that I wore proudly on my chest. Being busy meant a packed calendar with clients that needed me; boy, that felt good! Look at all these people that need my advice! My counsel! A busy calendar, a busy life meant that I was in demand. I was needed. I was important. I was winning. I was loved. I was in control. And if I’m in control, I don’t need help or guidance; I need to keep going, don’t stop!
We keep going. We don’t stop. Until I couldn't anymore.
Before I get into that, I want to give a TRIGGER warning: The story that follows deals with losing a child (stillbirth).
You see, six years ago, my wife was pregnant with our third child. We watched the due date come and go, but we were no strangers to this process; our other two both went past their due dates as well. Thursday, August 11th, my wife went for an ultrasound, and everything showed that the baby (and my wife) was doing more than fine.
The next day, I was at work, and my wife gave me the message: It's time to come home. So I swooped in like some sort of superhero and whisked our other two kids off to their grandparents. When I got back home, our midwife was there waving some sort of wand over my wife's stomach.
“There doesn't seem to be a heartbeat,” someone said.
We rushed to the hospital where our little boy, Ezra, was born. Born without a breath. Instead of listening to our son fill his lungs and let out that newborn cry, all I heard was my sobs.
Fast forward nine months: I was back at work, I had started therapy, and we were expecting another child. I thought I was doing this whole grief thing really well! In some ways, grief became this game that I thought I could win.
Then one day, I had just finished up with a particularly stressful client, and I went on vacation—the first vacation or time off I had taken since we lost our son. The moment we got to the cottage, my back broke out in what I thought were hives. Turns out - it was shingles; boy did that hurt! I had kept myself busy for almost a year since we lost our son, and the moment I stopped, my body told me I should have stopped a lot sooner.
We keep going without stopping because if we stopped, we’d have to realize that we, too, are broken.
The reality is that we can’t be happy all the time! We can’t live in this joyous bliss forever; that’s simply not how life works. That’s the reality of being a human. We get the absolutely beautiful parts of life: the things that fill us up and put a smile on our face, the things that make us laugh so hard that tears come rolling down our face. Then, there are tough moments as well. The things that devastate us, knock us down, and things that just plain old suck.
That’s just part of being human - on the one hand, we experience awe and wonder, and on the other, sorrow and pain.
We try to numb those difficult feelings, don’t we? According to the alcohol industry, they’ve done increasingly well over the past couple of years! A recent poll through the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health (CAMH) reported that 25% of Canadians aged 35-54 and 21% of those aged 18-34 have increased their alcohol consumption during the pandemic.1
Substances weren't the only way we chose to numb ourselves, however. We also numbed through online shopping and gambling, eating all the things, or even by…you guessed it…keeping busy and not stopping.
Here’s the thing, though, we can’t selectively numb! When we try and numb vulnerability, grief, shame, fear, and disappointment: We numb everything. That means we also numb the happiness, gratitude and joy that we experience.
So what can we do?
There are three things we can do, the first of which is to Stop (the other two will be written about in greater length in the following two articles).
This past summer, we went up to our cottage, and one afternoon I laid in the hammock listening to music and reading my book. For the whole afternoon. Partway through the afternoon, my mind and body decided to have a conversation:
Mind: Ummmm….body? I think we should probably get going again, we've already been here for an hour and a half, and there is still so much that we should be doing!
Body: Yeah, that's true...but…it's so quiet and relaxing here! And I'm tired!
Mind: Buuuuuuuuttttttt, and hear me out here...the longer we lie here, the less stuff we can get done!
Body: Yeah, yeah...I get that, but why? Why does it matter? Right now, we're fed, we're safe, and we're enjoying ourselves. Oh...and WE'RE ON VACATION!
My body made a good point.
Yes, there are times when we should keep going. There are times when we shouldn’t stop. BUT never at the expense of ignoring our emotions. As we talked about last week, the more we run from our emotions, the more pain we are inflicting on ourselves and the people around us.
That is the importance of stopping, of drawing those boundaries and taking stock of what’s happening around us and within us. Before we can start even noticing how we are doing, we have to stop. Stop the hustling, the grinding, the avoiding, the busyness of it all.
I remember hiking with friends years ago (before everyone had a cell phone) and getting lost in the forest. We had been walking for hours, trying to find our way out, but really, we were just heading in circles. We started to get worried when darkness was beginning starting to set in, and as we were really freaking out, we stopped. As we looked around, we realized that we just happened to be at a fork in the trail where we could go left or right. The left side of the trail was well-worn, while the right side was barely noticeable. So we went right and three minutes later found our car. Had we not stopped, we would have continued our loop and missed our vehicle again.
Stopping gives us the chance to breathe, rest, and take stock of what is happening in our lives and the emotions coming to the surface.
So before we can start processing the last couple of years, we first need to stop. Find a couple of moments in your day, week, month, maybe even year that you can purposely stop to see where you are at.
What about you? What allows you to stop and take stock of what’s happening around you?
If you missed the first post of this series, you can find that here. Below are the subsequent posts: