Nature or Nurture?

I stink at nurturing myself. Really stink at it. I sat on the couch through one of the worst movies ever on Saturday afternoon, Event Horizon, for two and a half hours thinking "I should turn this off" but I didn't, not once. In it, an experimental spaceship named Event Horizon navigates by folding space, enabling the shortest distance between two places to no longer be a straight line and thereby doing all sorts of funky things to the space time continuum, effectively allowing the ship to outrun light speed. This space folding concept has fascinated me ever since I read A Wrinkle in Time seven times in the fourth grade. Author Madeleine L'Engle (Smith '41) deemed it a tesseract; I just thought it was cool. But this concept took up a mere five minutes of plot time. The rest was dedicated to a search for a missing crew, followed by a realization that the ship had traveled to hell and brought hell back with it through a black hole and hell was now living within its walls. The crew then begins to die off in various hellish hallucinatory ways, one by one. I spoil this only  to spare you the agony I experienced at its hands because as I said, I really stink at nurturing myself.

Because of my profession, teaching, I am used to giving, giving, giving to others. It feels natural, it is habitual, it is ingrained. But after twenty plus years of donating, I need some return. So foreign is the concept of nurturing myself that I am about to hang a list of how to do so in my house in strategic places so that when I blank out, I can refer to it. Things like:

• have a cup of tea
• drink a glass of cold water
• make an ice cream cone
• take a long walk outside
• sit by the river
• listen to Broadway show tunes
• take tap dancing lessons
• go to a concert
• go to a play
• go to a museum
• go to Boston
• go to NYC
• make a lunch date with _________
• travel
• walk Mark's dogs
• cuddle LP (Little Pup)
• garden
• write, write, write
• go to writing conferences
• play your flute
• find the creatives
• hang out with the creative types a massive amount

Ridiculous to have to remind oneself to take self-care by posting a written list? Absolutely. Necessary in this whirlwind world? Perhaps. Up against such natural self-sacrifice, I must conscientiously choose nurture because it doesn't choose me.