How to Stop Fighting Where You Are

The ache of wanting to be somewhere else, and what changed when I quit swimming against it.

A while back, I started a new year sick.

Nothing dramatic. Coughing, sneezing, sore throat, a headache parked behind my eyes. Just miserable enough to cancel everything.

And I wanted to be anywhere else. Any other body, any other week. A new year is supposed to mean momentum, and instead everything in mine had come to a screeching halt.

Here’s what was actually going on underneath the sniffling. I was fighting it. Hard.

Because somewhere in me, being sick meant something. It meant I was weak. A quitter. Unreliable. Somebody who couldn’t push through when it counted. The voice in my head was very clear about the rules: I shouldn’t need a nap. I shouldn’t sleep in. I shouldn’t be sick at all.

I spent decades installing that program. The Marine Corps rewards pushing through. So does adventure racing, which I did for years with Red Bull’s logo on my chest. For a long stretch, push through was basically my personality.

Then I remembered a conversation I’d just had with my son. We were talking about life, and I told him about rip currents. If one grabs you, the way out is to swim with it, or across it, and let it spend itself. Swim straight against it and it will exhaust you before you gain 10 feet. People drown that way, strong swimmers included.

Great advice. Apparently I only hand it out to other people.

Because there I was, swimming straight into the current. And lying on the couch, too stubborn to actually rest, I finally saw it: where there’s resistance, there’s a lack of ease. Dis-ease. Fighting being sick was, pretty literally, making me sicker.

I think the same current runs through bigger things than a head cold. The quarter that stalls. The season where the business feels stuck in wet cement. The inner weather that won’t lift no matter how many wins you stack on top of it. The ache is the same ache: I want to be somewhere I’m not. And the fight against where you are will drain you faster than the where ever could.

What worked, once I stopped thrashing, was old and simple.

When I was a kid and got sick, my mom would bundle me up on the couch with orange juice and chicken noodle soup. And looking back, the medicine was mostly the atmosphere. Nobody expected a single thing from me. I was allowed to just be a sick kid on a couch, and completely okay.

Nobody’s coming to bundle me up anymore. That job is mine now.

And I learned something the day I tried to do it. The couch and the soup and the remote only work if your mind comes along for it. You can wrap yourself in blankets while the judge in your head keeps reading the charges, and you’ll get exactly zero rest.

So the real work happened up top. Drop the shoulds. Forgive the verdicts. Offer myself the same deal my mom offered me: you’re allowed to be exactly where you are, and you’re loved there.

That afternoon I bundled up with a pillow and a blanket, a good book, a cup of tea, and the TV remote.

And for the first time in days, I wanted to be right where I was.

With love, Andy

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