A few days ago, I was watering the garden and listening to a podcast Jenn sent me, an interview with Maria Bowler about her book Making Time: A New Vision for Crafting a Life beyond Productivity. About fifteen minutes into the interview, Bowler says resistance is intelligent. My brain immediately leapt into Star Trek mode: resistance is futile. And right there, in front of the tomatoes, I remembered something I’d forgotten: sometimes our mother, instead of yelling at us to get off our butts and do whatever it was she’d already told us to do fifteen times, sometimes our mother pretended to be Borg. Resistance is futile, she would say when we tried to get out of doing our homework. Resistance is futile, she'd say when we whined about washing the dishes, brushing our teeth, taking a bath, and going to bed.
When I left my Borg mom and landed back in the garden, I had to rewind the podcast and focus again on listening to the conversation, which was all about the need to pay attention when you feel resistance in your body, to honor that resistance when you can, and recognize that sometimes you have no choice but to push through (like when the dog needs walking even though the wind is blowing the rain side-ways. Or when the baby needs a diaper change, and the toddler needs a snack, and you need to not be touched or looked at for at least twenty-four hours.). Whether we can act on it or not, our body’s resistance is giving us very important information if we pay attention and learn to decipher its wisdom.
For the past half hour, I’ve been writing about resistance, but the whole time, I just want to lay down. The writing feels choppy and awkward. Flow is not what’s happening here. My body is resistant to writing about resistance. Probably because I’m tired. I’ve slept horribly this week. Is it perimenopause (night sweats during a heat wave are a particular kind of awful)? Is it our bed (which is starting to feel too firm for my middle-aged shoulders and hips)? Is it my brain spinning from all the ways I know I should engage in more political resistance? Is it the okra I ate for dinner last night fighting with my Crohn's-addled small intestines?
Resistance is futile, I hear, again, in my mother’s voice. Resistance is futile might well have been the motto of my 20’s and 30’s. It doesn’t matter what your body wants or needs when you have a to-do list three pages long and the dog still needs that walk in the windy rain, and the baby’s diaper is still dirty, and the toddler is still hungry. Just get through the shit that needs doing. You can rest later.
As a young mama, taking care of myself was at the bottom of the list, but a barely conscious survival instinct forced me to seek out community. In the belly of that community, something amazing happened. Weekly Hip Mama potlucks, childcare trades, afternoons spent cleaning each other’s homes and cooking together–I didn’t know it then, but all of the ways I helped take care of my community were also ways of taking care of myself.
But those chaotic days are over, and now I’m an empty-nester with the luxury, the privilege, the time to walk away from the to-do list and go lay the fuck down. I also have the chronic disease (probably not unrelated to the exhaustion and stress from those days when resistance was futile) that tells me my body’s resistance is necessary. Stopping is no longer a suggestion. It's a demand. When I run up against my body’s resistance, when I can say yes to my body’s no, space opens up for something new to emerge. In other words, I’m learning, finally, to take care of myself.
One of the principles of Joyful Practice that Jenn and I are exploring is this imperative to take care of ourselves and each other. When we add “each other” to “take care of ourselves”, Joyful Practice becomes a form of political resistance.
This reminds me of a sign I used to carry at protests when my kids were little. Resistance is Fertile. A quick search of resistance is fertile, and I found a Substack article by @anniewhere. I was particularly struck by this passage about the necessity of friction:
in physics, resistance is the alchemist of energy — transforming one state into another. resistance in a light bulb births illumination, in a toaster creates warmth, in a speaker gives voice to silence. unnecessary friction disrupts flow, yes — but the right friction causes meaningful state changes that solidify our ideas from vaporware to tangible form. creative friction generates not just heat but metamorphosis.
Creative friction might be yet another form of Joyful Practice. The friction of cross-pollination creates something new. New ideas and relationships. New communities and political systems. New ways of taking care of ourselves and each other can metamorphosize when resistance becomes fruitful.
There is wisdom in resistance. It's an essential element to creative practice and a necessary means of communication–in our bodies and out in the world. The trick is learning to listen.
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